It’s amazing what creative projects show up if you give one simple constraint. In this case, we asked what cool things can be done if powered by one coin cell battery and we had about one hundred answers come back. Today we’re happy to announce the winners of the Coin Cell Challenge.
Continue reading “Coin Cell Hacks That Won The Coin Cell Challenge”
The 1 kB Challenge deadline has come and gone. The judges have done their work, and we’re ready to announce the winners. Before you jump down to find out who won, I’d like to take a moment to say thanks to everyone who participated. We had some incredible entries. To say that judging was hard is quite an understatement. Even [Eben Upton], father of the Raspberry Pi got in on the action. He created a new helicopter game for the classic BBC Micro. Look for writeups on the winners and many of the other entries in the coming weeks.
The grand prize goes to [Jaromir Sukuba] for Brainf*cktor. [Jaromir] went above and beyond this time. He created a computer which can be programmed in everyone’s favorite esoteric programming language. Brainf*cktor uses 1019 bytes of program memory in [Jaromir’s] PIC18F26K22. You can write, execute and edit programs. [Jaromir] ran into a bit of a problem with his LCD. The character tables would have thrown him over the 1 kB limit. Not a problem – he designed his own compressed character set, which is included in the 1019 bytes mentioned above. All the clever software takes physical form with a homemade PCB, and a case built from blank PCB material. Best of all, [Jaromir] has explained his software tricks, as well as included a full build log for anyone who wants to replicate his project. All that hard work will be rewarded with a Digi-Comp II kit from EMSL.
First prize goes to [Dumitru Stama] with M0S – CortexM0 RTOS in 1024 bytes. Operating systems are complex beasts. Many of our readers have toyed with the Linux Kernel. But writing a real-time OS from scratch? That’s quite an undertaking. [Dumitru] didn’t shy away from the challenge. He designed a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) for ARM processors, written completely in ARM thumb assembly instructions. This is no bare-bones executive. M0S has a rich list of features, including preemptive task scheduling, mutexes, and inter-process communication. [Dumitru] even gave us memory allocation with an implementation of malloc() and free(). The OS was demonstrated with a NUCLEO-F072RB board from ST-Micro.
[Dumitru] didn’t just drop a GitHub link and run. He documented M0S with seven project logs and a 37-minute long video. The video uses electronic whiteboard drawings to clearly explain all the internal workings of the operating system, as well as how to use it.
[Dumitru] is the proud new owner of a Maker Select 3D printer V2!
Second prize goes to [Cyrille Gindreau] with 1K Challange Laser. Vector lasers generally take lots of memory. You have to manage galvanometers, laser drive, and perform all the magic it takes to convert a set of vectors to lines drawn in space. The project uses 912 bytes of program and initialized data memory to command an MSP430 to draw an image.
Proving that flattery will get you everywhere, [Cyrille] picked the Hackaday logo as the subject. The Jolly Wrencher is not exactly simple to convert to vector format, though. It took some careful optimizations to come up with an image that fit within 1 kB. [Cyrille] wins a Bulbdial Clock kit from EMSL.
Third prize goes to [Mark Sherman] with tinygames. Video games have been around for awhile, but they are never quite this small. [Mark] coaxed the minuscule Atmel ATtiny84 to play Centipede with only 1024 bytes of program memory. Even the BOM is kept small, with just a few support components. Control is handled by an Atari 2600 compatible joystick. Video is black and white NTSC, which is demonstrated on a period accurate CRT. [Mark] generates his video by racing the electron beam, exactly the same way the Atari 2600 did it.
[Mark] will take home a Blinkytile kit from Blinkinlabs.
First of all, I’d like to thank the judges. Our own [Jenny List], [Gerrit Coetzee], [Pedro Umbelino], [Bil Herd], and [Brian Benchoff] worked hard with me in judging this contest. I’d also like to thank our community for creating some amazing projects. The contest may be over, but these projects are now out there for others to build, enjoy, and learn from.
I’ve wanted to organize this contest since [Jeri Ellsworth] and [Chris Gammell] took on the 555 contest way back in 2011. The problem is creating a set of rules that would be relatively fair to every architecture. I think 133 entries to this contest proves that we found a very fair set of constraints. It is safe to say this won’t be the last 1 kB Challenge here at Hackaday, so if you have ideas for future editions, share them in the comments!
Dtto, a modular robot designed with search and rescue in mind, has just been named the winner of the 2016 Hackaday Prize. In addition to the prestige of the award, Dtto will receive the grand prize of $150,000 and a residency at the Supplyframe Design Lab in Pasadena, CA.
This year’s Hackaday Prize saw over 1,000 entires during five challenge rounds which asked people to Build Something that Matters. Let’s take a look at the projects that won the top five prizes. They exemplify the five challenge themes: Assistive Technologies, Automation, Citizen Scientist, Anything Goes, and Design Your Concept. 
Grand Prize Winner ($150,000 and a residency at the Supplyframe Design Lab): Dtto is modular robot built with 3D printed parts, servo motors, magnets, and readily available electronics. Each module consists of two boxes, rounded on one side, connected by a bar. The modules can join with each other in many different orientations using the attraction of the magnets. Sections can separate themselves using servo motors.
Dtto is groundbreaking in its ability to make modular robots experimentation available to roboticists and hobbiests everywhere by sidestepping what has traditionally been a high-cost undertaking. While it’s easy to dismiss this concept, the multitude of different mechanisms built from modules during testing drives home the power of the system.
Third Place ($10,000): An optics bench is a series of jigs used to hold and precisely align elements for optical experiments. Traditionally this meant highly specialized equipment starting in the tens-of-thousands of dollars. But schools, hackerspaces, and individuals don’t need top-of-the-line equipment to begin learning about optics. The project has designed holders for salvaged optics and the ancillary materials to conduct experiments, and even includes a standardized carrying case design.
Fifth Place ($5,000). Stepper motors are known for accurate movement, but they are often used as open loop systems and prone to lose track of position either from missed steps or outside interference. Mechaduino adds a high accuracy magnetic encoder to any of several commonly available stepper motors, closing that loop and adding functionality. This includes positional awareness, but goes for beyond to velocity and torque control, and user interaction.
The 2015 Hackaday Prize is all about solutions to problems affecting a large number of people, and aging touches everyone. This week we were on the lookout for the entries best addressing the problem of Aging in Place. This means being able to live in your home and community independently and comfortably as one ages. It is as important to the aging as it is to their friends and family; a topic well worth your hacking skills and engineering brilliance.
There were several entries that focused on monitoring for out-of-the-ordinary behavior. The Personal Medical Assistant seeks to leverage the sensor array and computing power of smartphones combined with ancillary data harvesting from things like an ECG chest band or a pulse oximeter watch. The idea is to watch for a series of precursors to health emergencies and warn both the person being monitored and their support network of family or caretakers.
The whimsically title Ye Oldie Monitor focuses on a similar idea with a more passive role. The concept suggests a base-station and a series of remote monitors throughout the living area, like PIR motion sensors, to alert for notable variations on a person’s normal day-to-day activities. In a similar vein the LiteHouse project would retrofit the household lighting fixtures with motion detectors. These automatically light each area to help prevent low-light accidents like falls, while also monitoring for signs of duress.
Watching out for each other is complicated by distance. We saw a few entries that try to alleviate that, like the Being There with Pi project. Smartphones and computers are a great way to communicate, until you need help making your smartphone or computer work in order to do so. This project looks at developing a dedicated video conferencing system based around the Rasperry Pi. The point is to develop an excruciatingly simple, robust form of live video communications.
Continuing on the note of simplified communications is Julia’s Speakerphone project. [Julia] is living with multiple sclerosis that has resulted in her being bed bound for almost a decade. Making phone calls has been both rare and leaves us wondering why this sort of solution isn’t already in wide adoption. The solution is a combination of a Bluetooth hands-free calling module, Android tablet, Skype a pay-as-you-go cellphone, and an interesting button hack for [Julia] to activate the hand’s free. It is crafted with leaf switches and polymorph and worn as a bracelet. The proof of concept is there and we can’t wait to see this evolve into a more robust and extensible solution.
First place this week goes to the Personal Medical Assistant and will receive a RE:load Pro programmable constant current load.
Second place this week goes to Julia’s Speakerphone and will receive a Sparkfun Microview.
Third place this week goes to Being There with Pi and will receive a Hackaday CRT-android head tee.
We’ll announce next week’s theme a bit later today. Don’t let that stop you from entering any ideas this collection of entries may have inspired.
We’re happy to announce 16 winners of the Sci-Fi Contest! The Hackaday Crew is thoroughly impressed with pretty much everything that was entered. The 50 projects which were marked as “complete” spanned a wide range of Science Fiction universes, and showed off the talent of the hackers who posted them.
As a quick side note: Some people have confused this contest with The Hackaday Prize. That one is still on, runs into November, and offers a trip into space as the grand prize. Get hacking!
We have a range of prizes for the winners. The Grand Prize winning team can choose between two packages, one is anchored by a pair of oscilloscopes (an OWON DS7102 and a Rigol DS1052E), the other swaps out the OWAN for a soldering station and a rework station. Top Prize winners can choose between three packages which offer a rework station, a soldering station, or a collection of dev boards. And finally, the community favorites can choose from several Sci-Fi themed prizes like Blu-Ray, DVD, coasters, toothbrushes, and other kitsch. For a complete list of the prizes, check out the contest announcement.
The Verbal Morality Statute Monitor project was an early favorite of ours because the choice of Sci-Fi tech was perfect; a symbolic centerpiece of a dystopian future that can be perfectly replicated with current technology.
[tdicola] and his suspect partner [colabot] moved far beyond that favored status with a solid build that included mechanical design (which was quite a hack), hardware, and software.
The shiny unit hangs on the wall and listens for profanity, sounding an alarm and printing a citation whenever one is detected. We do hope that this ends up in a public space — perhaps a hackerspace full of foul-mouthed members. The delight of the Morality Monitor is that it can generate extra revenue and we suspect offenders will be happy to pay-up… well, maybe at first.
The scope of this project, which is the work of [Jerome Kelty] and [Greg Hatter], is impressive. The full-size Iron Man suit is wearable, true to the look of the film version, and packed full of animatronics. It won’t stop bullets, blow up bad guys, or fly… but it looks as if it can do all of that.
From helmet to boots the exoskeleton is packed with electronics. These are comprised mostly of things that light up, and things that move parts of the suit. But you also need a way to control that functionality and this is one of the most clever aspects of the design.
Each glove has an RFID tag reader in the palm area, with tags on the fingertips of the third and fourth finger. Closing your fingertip to your palm initiates a programmed sequence. All of this is well-documented in the Project Details section, with code and schematics for each subsystem shared as Build Logs.
This rover looks like an elegant insect. In a world full of clunky-looking robotics projects that’s high praise. The name of the project is an acronym for the MADspace Advanced Robtics System; a project which, from the start, sought to recreate an Open Design version of the NASA Rovers known as Spirit and Opportunity.
[Guus van der Sluijs], [Paul Wagener], and [Tom Geelen] turned this project into a showcase of what today’s widely available design software and fabrication tools can accomplish. Most of the connecting pieces were 3D printed (check out all of them in the components list), with 10mm aluminum tubing making up the rest of the chassis, and rockers to support the six wheels. Speaking of wheels, check out all the fab work that went into those! And we haven’t even mentioned the hw/sw which drives the thing!
This one has a very visceral hacked feeling which immediately made us take note. When you start to dig into the work which [Atheros] and [bwa] put into the Time Circuit Clock from the movie Back to the Future, the project really stands in a place of its own. Inspiration to build this came from a design which was posted by Hackaday alum [Phil Burgess] over at Adafruit.
The large collection of 14 and 7 segment display modules which make up the three parts of the clock are all hosted on about 23 PCBs which were etched as part of the development process. The electronic assembly is solid, with ribbon cables and modular design to keep it as tidy as possible. The frames for the displays are cut out of wood and the entire thing is controlled from a keypad. The clock, alarm, and FM radio make this a perfect bedside device — if you can abide being blasted by three colors of LED displays as you try to sleep.
This one is hard to sum up with a single image, because The Marauder’s Map uses radio frequency communication to track beacon locations of boards like the one pictured here. Well, they tried to use this custom hardware but were unable to work out all the bugs and ended up showing the proof of concept using some EZ430-RF2500 dev boards.
We’re certainly not holding that against [phreaknik] and [ wahwahweewahh]. The amount of software that went into the mapping system is arguably more impressive than a bug-free prototype board would have been. The system can take the dimensions for any room, as well as locations of the base stations. It then polls the base stations to triangulate relative position of the beacons with great accuracy.
We have confidence that the custom boards will work at some point (this would actually make a great entry for The Hackaday Prize, right?).
It was heartbreaking that these Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses didn’t make it into the top five. This, and the five projects above, were all in a tight race for the prizes. Since this project isn’t going to make the list of Skulled or Followed projects we’ve decided to award it one of those prize packages anyway in recognition of the wonderful work [Minimum Effective Dose] and his AI partner [Colabot] pulled off. The project is, of course, based on [Douglas Adams’] Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tech which allows the wearer to avoid getting upset in times of peril. The shutter glasses originally meant for 3D television viewing have been modified to sense danger and block the wear’s view of it.
The rest of the Honorable Mentions are awarded the honor of being mentioned (in alphabetical order):
There are also prizes for the most Skulled and most Followed projects. Here are those winners in rank order. This list was a snapshot from Wednesday, May 7th, and since Hackaday.io is a living site the totals will change over time. The five top winners are excluded from these prizes; Skulled winners cannot also win for Followers:
Most Skulled:
Most Followers:
All hackers who submitted what we deem to be a complete entry will receive a shirt. We’ll email with instructions on how to tell us your shirt size and mailing address.
It is with great pleasure that I announce the winners of the Fubarino Contest (alphabetical order): Brian, Daniel, Dave, Dominic, Eric, Gerben, James, Joel, Joseph, Laurens, Luis, Mats, Mike, Nathanael, Pete, Peter, Sebastian, Taciuc, Vojtěch, and Wes. They rose to the challenge and added our URL as an Easter Egg in their microcontroller project. Their hacks were chosen for their creativity, as well as completeness of presentation. Congratulations! Links to all twenty project features are after the break in reverse order in which they were originally published. To see all the entries hit up the contest tag.
We also want to take a moment to thank Microchip Technology Inc. They not only put up twenty Fubarino SD boards as prizes, they are also covering the cost of shipping to each winner. Many thanks!
We thought it was interesting that the twenty winners live in 11 different countries: Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Malaysia, Romania, South Africa, Spain, The Netherlands, UK, and the USA. Hackaday really is a global community!
If you are one of the winners please leave your acceptance speech in the comments section. This is also a great place to leave feedback — if you didn’t submit an entry we want to know why!
The 7400 Logic Competition has drawn to a close. The winners were announced and there are quite a few of them. There were fifteen first place winners named, nine second place, and nineteen third place projects. The bounty of quality entries is a testament to the popularity of the contest. It helps to have a wide range of prizes and the post linked above lists all of the sponsors who donated goodies as an incentive.
The board seen above was awarded the reader’s choice, to which the grand prize was awarded. It is a 7400 series calculator. [Umair Mukati] and [Naveed Ahmed] — both are students at the Institute of Industrial Electronics Engineering in Karachi, Pakistan — developed the device as part of a class project. It is capable of adding or subtracting two digit numbers. This includes support for negative numbers as results. We’ve embedded a video demo of the calculator in action after the break.
