Category Archives: 2018 Hackaday Prize

This Is The Raspberry Pi Robot To Beat All Others

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Before the introduction of the Raspberry Pi, building robots was hard. The best solution to turning motors on a chassis was repurposing an old roomba. For the brain, maybe you could throw Linux on a router and move your rover around with an old Linksys. Before that, you could buy a crappy robotics kit, thrown together in a box and sold as an ‘educational kit’. I’m sure there are a few readers out there that built robots by wire-wrapping HC11s.

Now we have 3D printers and Raspberry Pis, and with that comes a golden age of robotics. One of …read more

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See the Fabulous Workmanship in this Smart Pressure Regulator

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For many projects that require control of air pressure, the usual option is to hook up a pump, maybe with a motor controller to turn it on and off, and work with that. If one’s requirements can’t be filled by that level of equipment and control, then it’s time to look at commercial regulators. [Craig Watson] did exactly that, but found the results as disappointing as they were expensive. He found that commercial offerings — especially at low pressures — tended to leak air, occasionally reported incorrect pressures, and in general just weren’t very precise. Out of a sense of …read more

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Let the Musical Instrument Challenge Begin!

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Today is the start of the Musical Instrument Challenge. This newest part of the 2018 Hackaday Prize asks you to go far beyond what we’re used to seeing from modern musical instrumentation. Twenty entries will be awarded $1,000 each and go on to compete in the final round of the Hackaday Prize.

Imagine music without the electric guitar amp, violin, two turntables and a microphone, the electric drum pad, or in the absence of autotune. Maybe that last one made you groan, but autotune is a clever use of audio manipulation and when used to augment the music (rather than …read more

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Soft Hydraulic Muscles Lift Weights As A Team

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Working with hydraulics usually means having a fluid tank and valves. [consciousflesh] does away with both those for his DIY hydraulic artificial muscles. Instead, he uses a pair of muscles, both preloaded with fluid. To contract one, he pumps the fluid into the other, expanding that one, and vice versa. A bidirectional gear pump moves the fluid while also acting as a valve. And flexible materials replace heavy metal cylinders.

As we said, this is a DIY project. He made the muscles by surrounding silicone tubes with aramid fiber sleeves, giving added strength. The blocks at either end are also …read more

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Better Motion Through Electrostatic Actuators

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If you want something to move with electricity, odds are you’ll be using magnets. Deep inside every servo, every motor, and every linear actuator is a magnet and some coils of wire. There is another way of making things move, though: electrostatics. These are usually seen in tiny MEMS devices, and now we have tiny little electrostatic speakers making their way into phones and other miniature devices.

For [Nathann]’s Hackaday Prize entry, he’s building electrostatic actuators on the cheap, and not just tiny ones, either. He’s building ‘human’ scale electrostatic devices.

The reason electrostatic devices are usually very small is …read more

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This Is Your Last Chance To Design The Greatest Human Computer Interface

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This is your last chance to get your project together for the Human Computer Interface Challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize. We’re looking for innovative interfaces for humans to talk to machines or machines to talk to humans. These are projects that make technology more intuitive, more fun, and a more natural activity. This is your time to shine, and we’re accepting entries in the Human Computer Interface Challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize until August 27th. This is your last weekend to work on your project, folks.

This is one of the best years of the Hackaday Prize yet, …read more

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Listening To Mains Power

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There’s a lot you can tell by looking at the waveform of your mains power. There are harmonics, transient changes, and periodic fluctuations that are correlated to the demand on the grid itself. Frequency shifts will tell you how fast or slow your clocks are running, and someone probably has a poorly isolated power line communication thing somewhere in your neighborhood. There’s a lot you can learn by looking at the waveform coming out of your outlets, but how do you tap into that? [David] is doing it with a PC sound card and some really interesting hardware.

The Grid …read more

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Better Ways To Drive Nixie Tubes

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Ah, Nixie tubes. You’re not cool unless you have a few Nixie tubes sitting around, and you’re not awesome unless you’ve built your own Nixie tube clock. That’s what [Thomas] is doing for his entry into the Hackaday Prize, and he’s come up with a very low-cost way of doing it.

For the high voltage supply of this build, [Thomas] is turning to one of the standard circuits based on the MC34063 that’s simple enough and good enough to make everything work. There are really no surprises with the power supply here. This is all a project about turning on …read more

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Turning Everything Into A Tap Controller

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Our entire life is staring at glowing rectangles, and all our surroundings are hard, flat surfaces. [Ben] had the idea to turn those flat surfaces into a generic tap interface controller, and his project for the Hackaday Prize might just do that.

Some of the prior art that went into this project includes Ping Pong Plus Plus, an augmented-reality-ish implementation of ping pong that puts projected light wherever a ping pong ball hits the table. The game does this by mounting piezos to the bottom of a table and just a slight bit of math to determine where on the …read more

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Rewinding Live Radio

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Even though it’s now a forgotten afterthought in the history of broadcasting technology, we often forget how innovative the TiVo was. All this set-top box did was connect a hard drive to a cable box, but the power was incredible: you could pause live TV. You could record shows. You could rewind TV. It was an incredible capability, that no one had ever seen before. Of course, between Amazon and Netflix and YouTube, no one watches TV anymore, and all those platforms have a pause button, but the TiVO was awesome.

There is one bit of broadcasting that still exists. …read more

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