Category Archives: 2016 Hackaday Prize

Hackaday Prize Entry: Robot Shore

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Everyone knows the ocean is not a gigantic garbage can, but unless you live in the middle of Asia, below sea level, Utah, or some other inhospitable place, all trash eventually makes it to sea. This is a problem not only for the the sea and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but for shorelines as well. For her Hackaday Prize entry, [Erin] is building a series of robots designed to walk the shore, pick up garbage, deposit it in a bin, and do it again after the next high tide.

The key problem for a robot that picks up trash …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Grasshopper Neurons

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A plague of locusts descends on your garden, and suddenly you realize grasshoppers are very hard to catch. Grasshoppers are nature’s perfect collision avoidance system, and this is due to a unique visual system that includes neurons extending directly from the eye to the animal’s legs. For this Hackaday Prize entry – and as a research project for this summer at Backyard Brains, [Dieu My Nguyen] is studying the neuroscience of grasshopper vision with stabs and shocks.

We visited Backyard Brains about two years ago, and found three very interesting projects. The first was a project on optogenetics, or rewiring …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Polling The Polling Places

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A decade and a half ago, a developer testified that he was contracted to make code that would swing an election using electronic voting machines. In this year’s presidential primaries, exit polling significantly differed from official results, but only in precincts using unverifiable electronic voting machines. A democracy can only exist if the integrity of the voting process can be assured, and there is no international electoral oversight committee that would verify the elections in every precinct of the United States.

Your vote may not count, but that doesn’t mean you should wait for hours to cast it. This Hackaday …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Cheap STM32 Dev Board

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Dev boards sporting a powerful ARM microcontroller are the future, despite what a gaggle of Arduino clones from China will tell you. Being the future doesn’t mean there’s not plenty of these boards around, though. The LeafLabs Maple has been around since 2009, and is a fine board if you want all that Processing/Wiring/Arduino goodies in a in an ARM dev board. The Maple has been EOL’d, and that means it’s time for a few new boards that build on what LeafLabs left behind.

This Hackaday Prize entry is for an almost-clone of the Leaflabs Maple Mini. It sports a …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: An Oven Of Raspberry Pis

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When the Raspberry Pi was introduced, the world was given a very cheap, usable Linux computer. Cheap is good, and it enables one kind of project that was previously fairly expensive. This, of course, is cluster computing, and now we can imagine an Aronofsky-esque Beowulf cluster in our apartment.

This Hackaday Prize entry is for a 100-board cluster of Raspberry Pis running Hadoop. Has something like this been done before? Most certainly. The trick is getting it right, being able to physically scale the cluster, and putting the right software on it.

The Raspberry Pi doesn’t have connectors in all …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Good Electronics Learning Toolkit

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The Maker movement is a wildly popular thing, even if we can’t define what it is. The push towards STEM education is absolutely, without a doubt, completely unlike a generation of brogrammers getting a CS degree because of the money. This means there’s a market for kits to get kids interested in electronics, and there are certainly a lot of options. Most of these ‘electronic learning platforms’ don’t actually look that good, and the pedagogical usefulness is very questionable. Evive is not one of these toolkits. It looks good, and might be actually useful.

The heart of the Evive is …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Autorouters Are For The Weak

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[Yann]’s DYPLED entry into this year’s Hackaday Prize isn’t very useful to most people. It’s a tiny module that connects to a 16-bit parallel bus, and displays a hexadecimal number on a few LEDs. It’s useful if you’re diagnosing a problem on a computer from 1982, but just barely. The real wonder here is how [Yann] is doing this cheaply and easily using some weird techniques and strange parts.

The display for this tiny device is an array of 36 LEDs, arranged into a set of five seven-segment displays. Homebrew seven-segment displays are cool, but how is he driving it?  …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: An Open Source Retina Scanner

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An ophthalmoscope is a device used to examine the back of the eye. This is useful for diagnosing everything from glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, to detecting brain tumors. As you would expect from anything related to medicine, these devices cost a lot, making them inaccessible for most of the world’s population. This project for the Hackaday Prize is for an ophthalmoscope that can be built for under $400.

An ophthalmoscope is a relatively simple device, that really only requires a clinician to wear a head-mounted lamp and hold a condensing lens in front of the patient’s eye. Light is reflected off …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Non-Computational Fluid Dynamics

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Computational Fluid Dynamics, or CFD, and is applied to everything from aircraft design to how good of a wing a new skyscraper will be. Of course, the science of building airfoils is much older than CFD, leading to the question of how airfoil design was done before computers.

The answer, of course, is a wind tunnel. Walk around a few very good air museums, and you’ll find wind tunnels ranging from the long wooden boxes built by the Wright brothers to fantastic plywood contraptions that are exceptionally interesting to woodworkers.

[Joel] needed final project as an upcoming aeronautical engineer, but …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Solar WiFi Rover Roves At Night

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[TK] has a stretch goal for his RC car project — enabling it to recharge on solar power during the day and roam around under remote Internet control at night. It’s like a miniature, backyard version of NASA’s Curiosity rover.

Right now, he’s gotten a Raspberry Pi Zero and a camera on board, and has them controlling the robot over WiFi. He looks like he’s having a great time piloting it around his house. Check out the video down below for (crashy) remote-controlled operation.

We can’t wait to see if solar power is remotely possible (tee-hee!) as an option for …read more

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