Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

Hackaday Prize Entry: Customizable Linear Actuators

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The current state of robotics, 3D printers, and CNC machines means any shade tree roboticist has the means to make anything move. Do you want a robotic arm? There are a dozen designs already available. Need an inverted powered pendulum? There are a hundred senior projects on that every semester. There is, however, one type of actuator that is vastly underutilized. Linear actuators aren’t ‘maker’ friendly, and building a customized linear actuator is an exercise in pain.

For their Hackaday Prize entry, the folks at Deezmaker are changing the state of linear actuators. They’ve created ‘Maker Muscle’, a linear actuator …read more

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Robotsota, Fighting Geese, and Machine Speak at World Create Day

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A few weekends ago, we kicked the Hackaday Prize into gear with World Create Day. This was a celebration of building stuff, and served as a get together for master builders to figure out what they’re going to build this year. We had an amazing turnout all around the globe, and a splendid time was had by all.

Mikkeli, Finland

According to the organizers of the Mikkeli World Create Day meetup, this town is tiny and in the middle of nowhere. Looking at a map, that seems to be a fair assessment. Nevertheless, Hacklab Mikkeli and the Mikkeli City Library …read more

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Friday Hack Chat: All About Hardware

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Join us this Friday for a Hack Chat that’s all about hardware. We’re going to be discussing Open Source hardware, product design, security, manufacturing, manufacturing in China, assembly, crowdfunding, DFM, DFA, and a whole bunch of other three-letter acronyms that make you say WTF.

Every Friday, we bring someone on the cusp of new technologies and interesting devices and invite them into the Hack Chat over on Hackaday.io. This week, we’re sitting down with [Mathieu Stephan], about designing, building, fabricating, and selling hardware.

[Mathieu] has a wealth of experience under his belt. He’s a firmware engineer who is very involved …read more

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Monoprice Releases Their Mini Delta Printer (On Indiegogo)

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Around this time last year, Monoprice quietly unveiled a small, $200 3D printer. At the time, a fully functioning printer at this price point wasn’t unheard of. A good 3D printer at this price point was. It turned out this printer was actually fantastic and completely changed the value proposition of desktop 3D printers.

In the year since the release of the MP Select Mini printer, Monoprice has been hard at work bringing costs down, reworking designs, and creating an even less expensive printer. Now, it’s out. It’s available for pre-order on Indiegogo right now. (Edit: No it isn’t, …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Collaborative Water Purification

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Look over any description of a water treatment plant, and you’ll find a description that includes the words, ‘coagulation tanks’. What are these treatment plants coagulating? You don’t want to know. How are they doing it? With chemicals and minerals. Obviously, there’s something else that can be done.

For their Hackaday Prize entry, [Ryan], [designbybeck], [Clint], [Wanda] and [Maker Mark] are investigating electrocoagulation. It’s an alternative to a frothy brew of chemicals that uses electricity to pull pollutants out of the water.

Right now, the tests are much smaller in scale than the tens of thousands of gallons you’d find …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Collaborative Water Purification

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Look over any description of a water treatment plant, and you’ll find a description that includes the words, ‘coagulation tanks’. What are these treatment plants coagulating? You don’t want to know. How are they doing it? With chemicals and minerals. Obviously, there’s something else that can be done.

For their Hackaday Prize entry, [Ryan], [designbybeck], [Clint], [Wanda] and [Maker Mark] are investigating electrocoagulation. It’s an alternative to a frothy brew of chemicals that uses electricity to pull pollutants out of the water.

Right now, the tests are much smaller in scale than the tens of thousands of gallons you’d find …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: Collaborative Water Purification→

Sip-and-Puff Touchscreens and Grilled Meat During World Create Day

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In the last few weeks, we’ve been seeing a remarkable growth in the entries to The Hackaday Prize. This is due in no small part to World Create Day, a worldwide celebration of building stuff. It’s a worldwide buildathon with hackerspaces all around the globe. Now we’re getting a peek at the results of these gatherings, the videos are posted, and we’re simply gobsmacked by what was created during World Create Day.

Spinal Cord Hacks

The gang over at the Blusson Spinal Cord Center in Vancouver put together a two-day event for World Create Day. The goal of this event …read more

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JB Weld Fixes Cracked Cylinder Heads

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There are persistent rumors that the main ingredient in JB Weld is magic. This two-part epoxy that you would normally find on a shelf next to your basic 5-minute epoxy, Titebond, various cyanoacrylates, and Gorilla glue is somehow different. Stories of ‘some guy’ in the Yukon using JB Weld on a cracked engine block abound. These stories are of course met with skepticism.

Now, finally, we have evidence you can use JB Weld to fix an engine. [Project Farm] over on YouTube gave it the ultimate test: he took the cylinder head off a lawnmower, took a grinder to …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Self Sustained Low Power Nodes

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Consider for a second the Internet of Things. A vast network of connected devices, programmable matter, and wearable electronics can only mean one thing: there’s going to be a ton of batteries. While changing the battery in a smoke detector may seem tolerable, changing the batteries in a thousand sensor nodes is untenable. The solution to this problem is self-contained sensor nodes, and right now the best power source for mobile devices is probably solar.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Shantam Raj] is building a self-contained sensor node. It’s a Bluetooth device for the Internet side of this Thing, but …read more

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Hackaday Links: May 14, 2017

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Maker Faire Bay Area is next weekend, and you know what that means: we’re having a meetup on Saturday night. If you’re in the area, it’s highly recommended you attend. It’s a blinky bring-a-hack with booze. You can’t beat it. I heard the OPShark is showing up. All hail the OPShark. You’re gonna want to RSVP if you’re going k thx.

It only took twelve years, but [ladyada] finally got herself on the cover of Make.

Nvidia has the Jetson, an extremely powerful single board computer + GPU meant for machine learning, imagifying, and robotics applications. If you want to …read more

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