Category Archives: Hackaday Prize

Hackaday Prize Entry: DIY Foot Orthotics

Posted on by

What does your gait look like to your foot? During which part of your gait is the ball of your feet experiencing the most pressure? Is there something wrong with it? Can you fix it by adding or removing material from a custom insole? All these answers can be had with an expensive system and a visit to a podiatrist, but if [Charles Fried] succeeds you can build a similar system at home. 

The device works by having an array of pressure sensors on a flat insole inside of a shoe. When the patient walks, the device streams the data …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: DIY Foot Orthotics→

Hackaday Prize Entry: An MRI Machine

Posted on by

Magnetic resonance imaging devices are one of the most fantastically incredible machines humans have ever built. They’re capable of producing three-dimensional images of living tissue by flipping protons around with a magnetic field. Ninety percent of the population doesn’t know what that sentence means, yet you can find an MRI machine inside nearly any reasonably equipped hospital in America.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Peter Jansen] is building a magnetic resonance imager, capable of producing the same type of images you’d get from the radiology department at a hospital. It’s going to be a desktop unit, capable of scanning fruit …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: An MRI Machine→

Hackaday Prize Entry: Invisible

Posted on by

[Kate Reed] found a quote by a homeless that said “No one sees us”, which led her to exploring what it actually means to be invisible — and if we actually choose to be invisible by hiding away our emotions, sexual preference, race or income. She realized that too often, we choose to only see what we want to see, rendering all the rest invisible by looking away. Her public art campaign and Hackaday Prize entry “Invisible” aims to increase social awareness and strengthening the community by making hidden thoughts, feelings and needs visible.

Inspired by the artist [Jin Young …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: Invisible→

Hackaday Prize Entry: A Universal Glucose Meter

Posted on by

If you need an example of Gillette’s razor blade business plan, don’t look at razors; a five pack of the latest multi-blade, aloe-coated wonder shaver is still only about $20. Look a glucose meters. Glucose meters all do the same thing – test blood glucose levels – but are imminently proprietary, FDA regulated, and subsidized by health insurance. It’s a perfect storm of vendor lock-in that would make King Gillette blush.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Tom] is building what was, until now, only a dream. It’s a universal glucometer that uses any test strip. The idea, of course, is …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: A Universal Glucose Meter→

Hackaday Prize Entry: MyComm Handheld Satellite Messenger

Posted on by

We live in a connected world, but that world ends not far beyond the outermost cell phone tower. [John Grant] wants to be connected everywhere, even in regions where no mobile network is available, so he is building a solar powered, handheld satellite messenger: The MyComm – his entry for the Hackaday Prize.

The MyComm is a handheld touch-screen device, much like a smartphone, that connects to the Iridium satellite network to send and receive text messages. At the heart of his build, [John] uses a RockBLOCK Mk2 Iridium SatComm Module hooked up to a Teensy 3.1. The firmware is …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: MyComm Handheld Satellite Messenger→

Hackaday Prize Entry: A Local Positioning System

Posted on by

Use of the global positioning system is all around us. From the satnav in your car to quadcopters hovering above a point, there are hundreds of ways we use the Global Positioning System every day. There are a few drawbacks to GPS: it takes a while to acquire a signal, GPS doesn’t work well indoors, and because nodes on the Internet of Things will be cheap, they probably won’t have a GPS receiver.

These facts open up the door for a new kind of positioning system. A local positioning system that uses hardware devices already have, but is still able …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: A Local Positioning System→

Hackaday Prize Entry: SunLeaf

Posted on by

If there’s one place where the Internet of Things makes sense, it’s agriculture. From vast fields of soybeans, corn, and a different variety of corn, to the backyard garden, knowing how much sun, and rain crops get can vastly increase yields. For their Hackaday Prize project, [Adam] and [Shane] are building  a board designed explicitly for plants. It’s called the SunLeaf, and it has all the sensors and radios a good remote sensing board needs.

The SunLeaf is built around an ARM Cortex M4 microcontroller with an ESP8266 module for WiFi connectivity. Sensors are important for any remote sensing board, …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: SunLeaf→

Hackaday Prize Entry: A 400MHz Modem

Posted on by

The Internet of Things has been presented as the future of consumer electronics for the better part of a decade now. Billions have been invested, despite no one actually knowing what the Internet of Things will do. Those billions need to go somewhere, and in the case of Texas Instruments, it’s gone straight into the next generation of microcontrollers with integrated sub-GHz radios. [M.daSilva]’s entry to the 2016 Hackaday Prize turns these small, cheap, radios into a portable communicator.

This ‘modem for the 400 MHz band’ consists simply of an ATmega microcontroller, TI’s CC1101 sub-GHz transceiver, an OLED display, and …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: A 400MHz Modem→

Hackaday Prize Entry: A Raspberry Pi Project

Posted on by

There’s no piece of technology that has been more useful, more influential on the next generation of sysadmins and engineers, and more polarizing than the Raspberry Pi. For $35 (or just $5), you get a complete single board computer, capable of running Linux, and powerful enough to do useful work. For the 2016 Hackaday Prize, [Arsenijs] has created the perfect Raspberry Pi project. It’s everything you expect a Pi-powered project to be, and more.

While the Raspberry Pi, and the community surrounding the Raspberry Pi, get a lot of flak for the relatively simple approach to most projects which are …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: A Raspberry Pi Project→

Hackaday Prize Entry: Reverse GPS

Posted on by

Every time you watch a SpaceX livestream to see a roaring success or fireball on a barge (pick your poison), you probably see a few cubesats go up. Everytime you watch a Soyuz launch that is inexplicably on liveleak.com before anywhere else, you’re seeing a few cubesats go up. There are now hundreds of these 10 cm satellites in orbit, and SatNogs, the winner of the Hackaday Prize a two years ago, gives all these cubesats a global network of ground stations.

There is one significant problem with a global network of satellite tracking ground stations: you need to know …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: Reverse GPS→