Category Archives: 2018 Hackaday Prize

Bent PETG Fills A Nixie Gap

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Have you ever thought that Nixie tubes are cool but too hard to control with modern electronics? And that they’re just too expensive? [david.reid] apparently thought so and decided to create his own version of a Nixie tube, and it doesn’t get much cheaper than this.

While working on a 3D printed locomotive with his son, [david.reid] used clear PETG (Polyethylene Terephthalate Glycol) 3D printer filament to move light from LEDs to various parts of the locomotive. He found this was a success, but roughed up the outside of the filament to see what would happen. Lo and behold, a …read more

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Tesselated Worklights Are Nifty, Modular

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Electric lighting – is there anything it can’t do? Coming in all manner of forms and flavours, you can get everything from a compact reading lamp to a blindingly powerful worklight for your garage. Generally, different lights are built in different ways to suit their purpose, but it’s not the only way to do things. Enter [slisgrinder] and the MOSAIC Lighting System.

At its heart, MOSAIC is a way of building lighting rigs out of individual modules. Where it gets interesting is the design – they’re triangles! The boards carry a variety of LEDs and are laid out in a …read more

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Automating The Design Of Word Clocks

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Word clocks, or a matrix of light-up letters that spell out the time, are a standard build for all enterprising electronics enthusiasts. The trouble is finding the right way to drive a matrix of LEDs and the significant amount of brainpower that goes into creating a matrix of letters that will spell out the time without making it look like it’s supposed to spell out the time.

For his Hackaday Prize entry this year, [Stephen Legge] is creating a standard toolkit that makes word clocks easier to build. It’s a hardware and software project, allowing for LED matrices of any …read more

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Medium Machine Mediates Microcontroller Messages

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Connecting computers to human brains is currently limited to the scope of science fiction and a few cutting-edge laboratories. Tapping into some nerves farther from our central wetware is possible and [Peter Buczkowski] shows us his stylish machine for implanting a pattern into our brains without actively having to memorize anything.

His Medium Machine leverages a TENS unit to activate forearm muscles in a pattern programmed into an Arduino. Users place their forearm across two aluminum electrodes mounted on a tasteful wooden platform and extend a single finger over a button. Electrical impulses trigger the muscles which press the button. …read more

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Rotary Encoders Become I2C Devices

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Rotary encoders are the bee’s knees. Not only do you get absolute positioning, you can also use a rotary encoder (with a fancy tact button underneath) for an easy UI for any electronics project. There’s a problem with rotary encoders, though: it’s going to use Gray code or something weird, and getting a rotary encoder to work with your code isn’t as easy as a simple button.

For his Hackaday Prize project, [fattore.saimon] has come up with the solution for using multiple rotary encoders in any project. It’s a board that turns a rotary encoder into an I2C device. Now, …read more

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Resuming Failed 3D Prints Automatically

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What happens to your 3D printer if the power goes out? What happens if there’s a jam in the nozzle? What happens if your filament breaks, runs out, or turns into a plate of spaghetti? For all these situations, the print fails, wasting plastic and time. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [robert] has come up with a tiny device that saves all those failed prints, and it does it without batteries or a UPS.

The idea behind [robert]’s box is to monitor all the G-code being sent to the printer, and allow a print to be resumed after a failure. …read more

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Up, Up, Up: $2,000 More Seed Funding for Hackaday Prize Entries

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Getting a project off the ground often means an up-front investment in parts. Hackaday is upping our efforts to smooth out that obstacle for those who want to Build Something That Matters. Seed funding for the 2018 Hackaday Prize is simple, enter your Open Hardware design, share it far and wide so that a lot of people will show their admiration with a ‘like’ on the project page. If you’re in the Prize competition, you get a dollar for each like to help jump-start the build phase. If you haven’t entered, you get to encourage and reward the projects that …read more

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Recharging Drones On The Go With A Supercharger

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If Techcrunch is to be believed, our skies will soon be filled with delivery robots, ferrying tacos and Chinese food and Amazon purchases from neighborhood-area dispatch stations to your front door. All of this is predicated on the ability of quadcopters to rapidly recharge their batteries, or at the very least swap out batteries automatically.

For their Hackaday Prize entry, [frasanz], [ferminduaso], and [david canas] are building the infrastructure that will make delivery drones possible. It’s a drone supercharger, or a robot that grabs a drone, swaps out the battery, and sends it off to deliver whatever is in its …read more

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A Victrola For The 21st century

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We’ve lost something tangible in our listening to music, as we made the move from physical media through MP3 players to streaming services on our mobile devices. A 12″ vinyl disc may be slightly cumbersome, but there is an undeniable experience to pulling it from the sleeve and placing it on the turntable. Would you like to recreate that? [Castvee8] would, because he’s created a 21st-century version of a wind-up gramophone, complete with a turntable and horn.

Under the hood is an Arduino-controlled MP3 player, while on the surface is a 3D-printed turntable and horn. On the turntable is placed …read more

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