Category Archives: 2017 Hackaday Prize

Building The Hackaday Superconference Badge

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The best hardware conference is just a few weeks away. This is the Hackaday Superconference, and it’s two days of talks, an extra day of festivities, soldering irons, and an epic hardware badge. We’ve been working on this badge for a while now, and it’s finally time to share some early details. This is an awesome badge and a great example of how to manufacture electronics on an extremely compressed timetable. This is badgelife, the hardware demoscene of electronic conference badges.

So, what does this badge do? It’s a camera. It has games, and it’s designed by [Mike Harrison] of …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: UAProsthetics, a Powered Hand

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One of the great successes of desktop 3D printers is custom prosthetics and orthotics. For a fraction of the price of a prosthetic arm, you can buy a machine capable of producing hundreds of completely customizable prosthetics. [Taran Ravindran]’s project in the running for the 2017 Hackaday Prize follows the long tradition of building customized prosthetics. His prosthetic hand designed to be simpler and cheaper than conventional artificial limbs while still giving us some innovation in how this hand will move.

The digits on [Taran]’s hand are controlled by linear servos pulling on a series of Bowden cables. One servo …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Personal Guardian Keeps an Eye Out

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The Personal Guardian is a wearable tracking and monitoring device intended to help vulnerable people. The project goal is to allow these patients as much independence and activity as possible without a caregiver needing to be present. Wearing a sensor package might allow a memory care patient (for instance) greater freedom to wander.

The device consists of an Arduino 101 development board with a GSM shield that it uses to send SMS messages to the caregiver — for instance, if the accelerometer shows the patient fell over, or moved beyond certain GPS coordinates. Furthermore, the care-giver can monitor the device …read more

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The Hackaday Prize: Growing Your Own Soil

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When a rainforest is clearcut for agricultural use, we only see the surface problems: fewer trees, destruction of plant and animal habitats, and countless other negative effects on the environment. A lurking problem, however, is that the soil is often non-ideal for farming. When the soil is exhausted, the farmers move further into the rainforest and repeat the process.

In the Amazon, however, there are pockets of man-made soil that are incredibly nutrient-dense. Figuring out how to make this soil, known as Terra Preta, on a massive scale would limit the amount of forest destruction by providing farmers a soil …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Economical Bionic Leg

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When it comes to high-tech bionic legs for amputees, all the cool stuff is titanium, carbon fiber or other, more exotic materials. With carbon fiber “blades” all the rage, it’s easy to forget that simpler technologies still work, and could be made to work even better with the addition of some inexpensive electronics. The Economical Bionic Leg project is the result of that idea.

Project creators [PremJ20] and [G.Vignesh] aren’t kidding about bringing the cost of these bionic legs down. The target goal is $60 per, with stainless steel and silicon rubber as a cheaper alternative to carbon fiber —  …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Clunke Button Powers Accessibility

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An AT button is a device that helps people with all kinds of physical disabilities to interact with their world. There isn’t much to them,  just a switch wired up to a 3.5mm mono plug or jack, but the switch is installed in a large button housing that’s easy to operate.

These buttons can be used with any appliance or toy that can be adapted for mono input. They’re a simple piece of technology that makes a world of difference, but for some reason, they cost around $65 each. Because of this, people make their own simple switches, but these …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Clunke Button Powers Accessibility

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An AT button is a device that helps people with all kinds of physical disabilities to interact with their world. There isn’t much to them,  just a switch wired up to a 3.5mm mono plug or jack, but the switch is installed in a large button housing that’s easy to operate.

These buttons can be used with any appliance or toy that can be adapted for mono input. They’re a simple piece of technology that makes a world of difference, but for some reason, they cost around $65 each. Because of this, people make their own simple switches, but these …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: Clunke Button Powers Accessibility→

Hackaday Prize Entry: Scorpion DC-DC Voltage Converter

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Finding the right wall wart or charger to go with an appliance might be a matter of convenience to you and I, but there are some people who really, really need the right charger, because not having it could mean a fire.

[marius] is a Romanian hardware engineer who moved to Papua New Guinea, where he had the opportunity to travel in the remote jungle of that country. There, he saw many people who used solar panels to charge car batteries for a 3W light bulb at night, their phones, or other conveniences that only need a few Watt-hours a …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Telepresence with the Black Mirror Project

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The future is VR, or at least that’s what it was two years ago. Until then, there’s still plenty of time to experiment with virtual worlds, the Metaverse, and other high-concept sci-fi tropes from the 80s and 90s. Interactive telepresence is what the Black Mirror Project is all about. Their plan is to create interactive software based on JanusVR platform for creating immersive VR experiences.

The Black Mirror project makes use of the glTF runtime 3D asset delivery to create an environment ranging from simple telepresence to the mind-bending realities the team unabashedly compares to [Neal Stephenson]’s Metaverse.

For their …read more

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