Category Archives: 2018 Hackaday Prize

Hair Is Good Electronic Hub Real Estate

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When it comes to wearables, there are a few places you can mount rechargeable batteries and largish circuit boards. Certainly, badges hanging from a lanyard are a favorite here on Hackaday. A belt is another option. [deshipu] has come up with a good location on your head, provided you have long hair that is. That’s the hair clasp or barrette. It can support a hefty mass, be relatively large, and doesn’t touch your skin.

His plan gets even better, namely to use it as a hub for other electronics on your head, giving as examples: mechatronic ears and LEDs on …read more

Continue reading Hair Is Good Electronic Hub Real Estate→

Hair Is Good Electronic Hub Real Estate

Posted on by

When it comes to wearables, there are a few places you can mount rechargeable batteries and largish circuit boards. Certainly, badges hanging from a lanyard are a favorite here on Hackaday. A belt is another option. [deshipu] has come up with a good location on your head, provided you have long hair that is. That’s the hair clasp or barrette. It can support a hefty mass, be relatively large, and doesn’t touch your skin.

His plan gets even better, namely to use it as a hub for other electronics on your head, giving as examples: mechatronic ears and LEDs on …read more

Continue reading Hair Is Good Electronic Hub Real Estate→

DIY Puff-Suck Interface Aims for Faster Text Input

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Puff and Suck (or Sip and Puff) systems allow people with little to no arm mobility to more easily interact with computers by using a straw-like unit as an input device. [Ana] tells us that the usual way these devices are used to input text involves a screen-based keyboard; a cursor is moved to a letter using some method (joystick, mouse emulator, buttons, or eye tracking) and that letter is selected with a sip or puff into a tube.

[Ana] saw such systems as effective and intuitive to use, but also limited in speed because there’s only so fast that …read more

Continue reading DIY Puff-Suck Interface Aims for Faster Text Input→

DIY Puff-Suck Interface Aims for Faster Text Input

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Puff and Suck (or Sip and Puff) systems allow people with little to no arm mobility to more easily interact with computers by using a straw-like unit as an input device. [Ana] tells us that the usual way these devices are used to input text involves a screen-based keyboard; a cursor is moved to a letter using some method (joystick, mouse emulator, buttons, or eye tracking) and that letter is selected with a sip or puff into a tube.

[Ana] saw such systems as effective and intuitive to use, but also limited in speed because there’s only so fast that …read more

Continue reading DIY Puff-Suck Interface Aims for Faster Text Input→

A Motion Capture System For Everyone

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[Chordata] is making a motion capture system for everyone to build and so far the results are impressive, enough to have been a finalist in the Hackaday Human Computer Interface Challenge. It started a few years ago as one person’s desire to capture a digital performance of a dancer on a stage and has grown into a community of contributors. The board files and software have just been released as alpha along with some instructions for making it work, though more detailed documentation is on the way.

Fifteen sensor boards, called K-Ceptors, are attached to various points on the body, …read more

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Send Smooches over Skype with the Kiss Interface

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This project of [Nathan]’s certainly has a playful straightforwardness about it. His Skype ‘Kiss’ Interface has a simple job: to try to create a more intuitive way to express affection within the limits of using Skype. It all came about from a long distance relationship for which the chat program was the main means of communicating. Seeking a more intuitive and personal means of expressing some basic affection, [Nathan] created a capacitive touch sensor that, when touched with the lips, sends the key combination for either a kissy face emoji or the red lips emoji, depending on the duration.

Capacitive …read more

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There Are Multiple Ways To Gesture With This Serpentine Sensor

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Serpentine is a gesture sensor that’s the equivalent of a membrane potentiometer, flex and stretch sensor, and more.  It’s self-powering and can be used in wearable hacks such as the necklace shown in the banner image though we’re thinking more along the lines of the lanyard for Hackaday conference badges, adding one more level of hackability. It’s a great way to send signals without anyone else knowing you’re doing it and it’s easy to make.

Serpentine is the core of a research project by a group of researchers including [fereshteh] of Georgia Tech, Atlanta. The sensor is a tube made …read more

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The Diaphragm is the Coil in These Flexible PCB Speakers

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Speakers used to be largish electromechanical affairs, with magnets, moving coils, and paper cones all working together to move air around in a pleasing way. They’ve gotten much smaller, of course, small enough to screw directly into your ears or live inside the slimmest of smartphones and still delivery reasonable sound quality. The basic mechanism hasn’t changed much, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways to make transduce electrical signals into acoustic waves.

Take these speakers made from flexible printed circuit boards, for instance. While working on his flexible PCB soft actuators, [Carl Bugeja] noticed that the PWM signals …read more

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This Keyboard And Mouse Also Gives You A Workout

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The Ergonomic Handheld Mouse / Keyboard Alternative from [Shervin Emami] is an all-in-one solution for your keyboarding and cursor moving needs.

The core of this build is a ‘grip-strengthening’ device that’s sold to guitarists. While the actual benefit of these devices for guitarists is questionable — there are a few anecdotes any music teacher will tell you about classical pianists ruining their hands with similar devices — the device itself can be converted into a fantastic chording keyboard. All you really need for a full-functioned keyboard is a few buttons in a rugged shell, and this ‘grip strengthener’ has that …read more

Continue reading This Keyboard And Mouse Also Gives You A Workout→

This Keyboard And Mouse Also Gives You A Workout

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The Ergonomic Handheld Mouse / Keyboard Alternative from [Shervin Emami] is an all-in-one solution for your keyboarding and cursor moving needs.

The core of this build is a ‘grip-strengthening’ device that’s sold to guitarists. While the actual benefit of these devices for guitarists is questionable — there are a few anecdotes any music teacher will tell you about classical pianists ruining their hands with similar devices — the device itself can be converted into a fantastic chording keyboard. All you really need for a full-functioned keyboard is a few buttons in a rugged shell, and this ‘grip strengthener’ has that …read more

Continue reading This Keyboard And Mouse Also Gives You A Workout→