Category Archives: 2018 Hackaday Prize

Super Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses

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The Joo Janta 200 super-chromatic peril-sensitive sunglasses were developed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. By following the principle of, ‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you,’ these glasses turn completely opaque at the first sign of danger. In turn, this prevents you from seeing anything that might alarm you.

Here we see the beginnings of the Joo Janta hardware empire. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [matt] has created Nope Glasses. Is that meeting running long? Is your parole officer in your face again? Just Nope right out of that with a wave of the hand.

The …read more

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This Is An Inordinate Amount Of Switches

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How do you start a good habit? As a blogger, someone who spends a spectacular amount of time on Twitter, and a Thought Leader Life Coach, I can tell you: the best way to start a good habit is by doing it every day. [Arduino Enigma] has just the solution to procrastination, laziness, or whatever else is stopping you from forming a good habit. It’s a good habit tracker, and far too many switches on a single PCB.

The inspiration for this build comes from the master of shitty robots, [Simone Giertz], who built something containing 365 switches and 12 …read more

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Turning Tact Switches Into Keyboards

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One of the great unsolved problems in the world of DIY electronics is a small keyboard. Building your own QWERTY keyboard is a well-studied and completely solved problem; you need only look at the mechanical keyboard community for evidence of that. For a small keyboard, though, you’d probably be looking at an old Blackberry handset, one of those Bluetooth doohickies, or rolling your own like the fantastic Hackaday Belgrade badge. All of these have shortcomings. You’ll need to find a header for the Blackberry keyboard’s ribbon cable, the standard Bluetooth keyboard requires Bluetooth, and while the Belgrade badge’s keyboard works …read more

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Vaporwave For The Parallel Port

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FM synthesis is the sound of the 1980s, it’s the sound of shopping malls and Macintosh Plus. It’s the sound of the Motorola DynaTAC, busts of Helios, and the sound of ｖａｐｏｒｗａｖｅ　サ閲ユ. The chips most responsible for this sound is the OPL2 and OPL3, tiny little FM synthesizers on a chip, produced by Yamaha, and the core of the AdLib and Sound Blaster sound cards. It’s the chip behind the music in all those great DOS games.

Unfortunately, computers don’t have ISA slots anymore, and cards don’t work in 486 and Pentium-based laptops, the latest hotness for retrocomputing enthusiasts. …read more

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32 Shades Of Gray

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The ATtiny85 is an incredible piece of engineering. In just eight pins, you get a microcontroller with just enough oomph to do some really heavy lifting. You get an Open Source toolchain, and if you’re really good, you can build your own programmer. It does have its limits though; there isn’t a whole lot of Flash, and of course you’re always going to need a few extra pins.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [danjovic] is pushing whatever limits are left with the ‘tiny85. He’s using it as a test pattern generator, pushing out pixels to any old TV. The entire …read more

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Hacked RC Transmitters Control All The Things

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If you have lots of RC creations about, each with their own receiver, you’ll know that the cost of a new one for each project can quickly mount up – despite RC receivers being pretty cheap these days. What if you could use a NRF24L01+ module costing less than $3?

That’s just what [Rudolph] has done for his Hackaday Prize entry, rudRemote. Though many people already spin their own RC link with the NRF24 modules, this sets itself apart by being a complete, well thought out solution, easily scalable to a large number of receivers.

The transmitter can be made …read more

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Robot Dances to the Beat of New YouTube Subs

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Sure, you could build some kind of numerical counter to keep track of new YouTube subscribers. But does an increasing digit display truly convey the importance of such an event? Of course not. What you need is something that recognizes this achievement for what it is and celebrates it with you. Something like Subby, the Interactive YouTube Subscriber Robot.

Whenever [brian brocken] gets a new subscriber, Subby’s little TV screen face lights up, and he either dances, salutes, or does another move within his impressive range of motion. [brian] wrote a Visual Basic app that searches his channel’s page for …read more

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Power Harvesting Challenge: Scavenge Some Power, Win Prizes

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It’s a brand new day as the Power Harvesting Challenge begins. This is the newest part of the 2018 Hackaday Prize and we’re looking for 20 entries who will each receive $1,000 and move onto the finals to compete for the top five spots, scoring cash prizes of $50k, $25k, $15k, $10k, and $5k.

Put simply, Power Harvesting is anything you can do that will pull some of the energy you need from a source other than wall-power or traditional battery tech. The most obvious power harvesting technologies are solar and wind. Ditch the battery in your doorbell for a …read more

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Turning That Old Hoverboard Into A Learning Platform

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[Isabelle Simova] is building Hoverbot, a flexible robotics platform using Ikea plastic trays, JavaScript running on a Raspberry Pi and parts scavenged from commonly available hoverboards.

Self-balancing scooters a.k.a. Hoverboards are a great source of parts for such a project. Their high torque, direct drive brushless motors can drive loads of 100 kg or more. In addition, you also get a matching motor controller board, a rechargeable battery and its charging circuit. Most hoverboard controllers use the STM32F103, so flashing them with your own firmware becomes easy using a ST-link V2 programmer.

The next set of parts you need to …read more

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Servo Becomes Mini Linear Actuator

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RC servos are a common component in many robotics projects, but [Giovanni Leal] needed linear motion instead of the rotary actuation that servos normally offer. The 3D Printed Mini Linear Actuator was developed as a way to turn a mini servo into a linear actuator, giving it more power in the process.

A servo uses a potentiometer attached to the output shaft in order to sense position, and the internal electronics take care of driving the motor to move the shaft to the desired angle. [Giovanni] took apart an economical mini servo and after replacing the motor with a 100:1 …read more

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