Makers and open hardware for innovation

Just like the garage computer explosion of the 70’s through the 80’s, which brought us such things as Apple, pong, Bill Gate’s hair, and the proliferation of personal computers, the maker movement is the new garage hardware explosion. Today, 135 million adults in the United States alone are involved in the maker movement.

Enthusiasts who want to build the products they want, from shortwave radios to personal computers, and to tweak products they’ve bought to make them even better, have long been a part of the electronics industry. By all measures, garage-style innovation remains alive and well today, as “makers” as they are called continue to turn out contemporary gadgets, including 3D printers, drones, and embedded electronics devices.

Making is about individual Do-It-Yourselfers being able to design and create with tools that were, as of a decade or two ago, only available to large, cash-rich corporations: CAD tools, CNC mills, 3D printers, low-quantity PCB manufacturing, open hardware such as Arduinos and similar inexpensive development boards – all items that have made it easier and relatively cheap to make whatever we imagine. For individuals, maker tools can change how someone views their home or their hobbies. The world is ours to make. Humans are genetically wired to be makers. The maker movement is simply the result of making powerful building and communication tools accessible to the masses. There are plenty of projects from makers that show good engineering: Take this Arduino board with tremendous potential, developed by a young maker, as example.

The maker movement is a catalyst to democratize entrepreneurship as these do-it-yourself electronics are proving to be hot sellers: In the past year, unit sales for 3D printing related products; Arduino units, parts and supplies; Raspberry Pi boards; drones and quadcopters; and robotics goods are all on a growth curve in terms of eBay sales. There are many Kickstarter maker projects going on. The Pebble E-Paper Watch raises $10 million. The LIFX smartphone-controlled LED bulb raises $1.3 million. What do these products have in common? They both secured funding through Kickstarter, a crowd-funding website that is changing the game for entrepreneurs. Both products were created by makers who seek to commercialize their inventions. These “startup makers” iterate on prototypes with high-end tools at professional makerspaces.

For companies to remain competitive, they need to embrace the maker movement or leave themselves open for disruption. Researchers found that 96 percent of business leaders believe new technologies have forever changed the rules of business by democratizing information and rewiring customer expectations. - You’ve got to figure out agile innovation. Maybe history is repeating itself as the types of products being sold reminded us of the computer tinkering that used to be happening in the 1970s to 1990ssimilar in terms of demographics, tending to be young people, and low budget. Now the do-it-yourself category is deeply intertwined with the electronics industry. Open hardware is in the center in maker movement – we need open hardware designs! How can you publish your designs and still do business with it? Open source ecosystem markets behave differently and therefore require a very different playbook than traditional tech company: the differentiation is not in the technology you build; it is in the process and expertise that you slowly amass over an extended period of time.

By democratizing the product development process, helping these developments get to market, and transforming the way we educate the next generation of innovators, we will usher in the next industrial revolution. The world is ours to make. Earlier the PC created a new generation of software developers who could innovate in the digital world without the limitations of the physical world (virtually no marginal cost, software has become the great equalizer for innovation. Now advances in 3D printing and low-cost microcontrollers as well as the ubiquity of advanced sensors are enabling makers to bridge software with the physical world. Furthermore, the proliferation of wireless connectivity and cloud computing is helping makers contribute to the Internet of Things (IoT). We’re even beginning to see maker designs and devices entering those markets once thought to be off-limits, like medical.

Historically, the education system has produced graduates that went on to work for companies where new products were invented, then pushed to consumers. Today, consumers are driving the innovation process and demanding education, business and invention to meet their requests. Makers are at the center of this innovation transformation.

Image source: The world is ours to make: The impact of the maker movement – EDN Magazine

In fact, many parents have engaged in the maker movement with their kids because they know that the education system is not adequately preparing their children for the 21st century. There is a strong movement to spread this DIY idea widely. The Maker Faire, which launched in the Bay Area in California in 2006, underlined the popularity of the movement by drawing a record 215,000 people combined in the Bay Area and New York events in 2014. There’s Maker Media, MakerCon, MakerShed, Make: magazine and 131 Maker Faire events that take place throughout the world. Now the founders of all these Makers want a way to connect what they refer to as the “maker movement” online. So Maker Media created a social network called MakerSpace, a Facebook-like social network that connects participants of Maker Faire in one online community. The new site will allow participants of the event to display their work online. There are many other similar sites that allow yout to present yout work fron Hackaday to your own blog. Today, 135 million adults in the United States alone are involved in the maker movement—although makers can be found everywhere in the world.

 

6,790 Comments

  1. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize Entry: Reverse Engineering Blood Glucose Monitors
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/10/hackaday-prize-entry-reverse-engineering-blood-glucose-monitors/

    Blood glucose monitors are pretty ubiquitous today. For most people with diabetes, these cheap and reliable sensors are their primary means of managing their blood sugar. But what is the enterprising diabetic hacker to do if he wakes up and realizes, with horror, that a primary aspect of his daily routine doesn’t involve an Arduino?

    Rather than succumb to an Arduino-less reality, he can hopefully use the shield [M. Bindhammer] is working on to take his glucose measurement into his own hands.

    [Bindhammer]’s initial work is based around the popular one-touch brand of strips. These are the cheapest, use very little blood, and the included needle is not as bad as it could be.

    Open source Arduino blood glucose meter shield
    https://hackaday.io/project/11719-open-source-arduino-blood-glucose-meter-shield

    Open hardware and software blood glucose meter using electrochemical test strips

    Reply
  2. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize Entry: Electronics Anywhere, Any Time
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/12/hackaday-prize-entry-electronics-anywhere-any-time/

    There has always been a need for electronic graph paper – a digital device that records ones and zeros, writes bits, and keeps track of analog voltages. Many moons ago, this sort of device was graph paper, wrapped around a drum, slowly spinning around once per day. With the advent of cheap, powerful microcontrollers and SD cards these devices have become even more capable.

    For their entry to the Hackaday Prize, [Kuldeep] and [Sandeep] have built Box0. It’s a lab in a bag, an open source data acquisition unit, and a USB device that toggles pins, all in one simple device.

    The hardware for this devices consists of an STM32F0 microcontroller, a USB port, and enough pins to offer up a few SPIs, an I2C bus, eight channels of digital output, two PWM channels, a UART, analog in, and analog out.

    Box0
    https://hackaday.io/project/11074-box0

    Free and open source tool for exploring science and electronics anytime anywhere

    Box0 — started with the idea of providing learners educational resources and tools that gives the freedom to discover science, technology and electronics by doing and sharing knowledge with others.

    As students, we wanted to have something that is affordable and help us learn not only in classrooms and restricted labs but anytime anywhere and can be used with a variety of open coursewares.

    Reply
  3. Tomi Engdahl says:

    TritiLED Lights Up The Night, Doesn’t Make You Glow
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/11/tritiled-lights-up-the-night-doesnt-make-you-glow/

    Lately tritium’s most common use has been in key chains and jewelry. A small amount of tritium is stored in a phosphor coated glass tube.

    In the USA, GTLS devices are only allowed to be used in specific cases such as watches, compasses, and gun sights (MURICA!). Key chains and jewelry are considered frivolous uses and are prohibited by the nuclear regulatory commission.

    They’re generally safe, unless you break the glass.

    TritiLED, a dim LED light source which can last for years. [Ted] is using a Luxeon Z LED, driven with PWM by a PIC 12F508 8 bit microcontroller. Running at 26.3 μA, he estimates about a year of run time on a CR2032 watch battery, or a whopping 15 years on a pair of lithium AA cells.

    TritiLED
    Multi-year always-on LED replacements for gaseous tritium light sources
    https://hackaday.io/project/11864-tritiled

    I quickly dismissed traditional glow-in-the-dark (phosphorescent) materials because of their short half-life and the need to “charge” them before use. Chemiluminescent markers (glow sticks) are better in this regard, but are too expensive to continually replace, and end up in landfills after one night’s use. Radioactive markers (especially tritium-based), with their constant glow and multi-year half-life, are technically almost perfect for this application: you can stick them to equipment and you’re done. The problem with tritium markers is that they’re not legal for manufacture or sale as general-purpose consumer devices in the United States (watches, compasses, and gun sights are exceptions). Even where they are legal, they are still quite expensive.

    Lithium battery powered devices are more dangerous than small tritium light sources, despite the NRC’s paternalistic approach and the general public’s fear of “radiation.” According to the Energizer CR2032 datasheet, an ingested lithium battery can lead to serious injury or death in as little as 2 hours. Further, improperly stored coin cell batteries can short out and cause fires or burst and cause chemical damage.

    TritiLED V1.0 is complete. This version uses a relatively expensive (but nearly ideal) Luxeon Z LED, and runs for a little over a year on a CR2032 battery (verified). Alternatively, it can run for 5 years (estimated) on a pair of lithium (Li/FeS2) AAA batteries, or 15 years (estimated) on a pair of lithium AA’s.

    Reply
  4. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Make Your Own Transparent Wood
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/12/make-your-own-transparent-wood/

    Want to bring your fine antique furniture into the 21st century? Make it clear with transparent wood. That’s what [blorggg] is doing over on Hackaday.io, and it looks cool enough to have a some interesting and novel applications besides small, clear test pieces.

    The recipe for transparent wood is surprisingly simple, and all the ingredients are readily available from a drug store or home supply store.

    Transparent Wood
    https://hackaday.io/project/12589-transparent-wood

    Make your own super strong, and super transparent wood! Easy and cheap at your house!

    Make strong and CLEAR composite materials with natural wood! Get all the strength of wood without all that darn opacity getting in your way! I figured out a quick and simple recipe with some cheap ingredients you can do right at home! Build wooden windows, or clear, wood cell-phone cases!

    This recipe is a modified basic version of comes from a paper by Zhu et al-

    Highly Anisotropic, Highly Transparent Wood Composites
    Mingwei Zhu, Jianwei Song, Tian Li, Amy Gong, Yanbin Wang, Jiaqi Dai, Yonggang Yao, Wei Luo, Doug Henderson, and Liangbing Hu

    Reply
  5. Tomi Engdahl says:

    I2C Bit Injection Adds Memory Banks To Everything
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/12/i2c-bit-injection-adds-memory-banks-to-everything/

    Many EEPROMs inside of one / inject additional bits into I2C bus
    http://morethanuser.blogspot.fi/2016/07/many-eeproms-inside-of-one-inject.html

    Many devices uses eeprom as permanent memory for small bunch of settings, e.g. TVs use it to remember last used channel after you disconnect the power cord, stereo sets remember last FM station used etc.

    So what if we want to have many banks for TV/FM radio or any other device? Usual way I have seen on the internet, was to add additional eeprom into i2c bus, and change state of A0,A1,A2 pins which are used to determine overall eeprom address. This solution works quite well, but if you need more banks, you just need to install more chips, power consumption will slightly increase, but more space need to be used and in my case this was a signal to think about find another way.

    Reply
  6. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize Entry: Linear Stepper Motors
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/15/hackaday-prize-entry-linear-stepper-motors/

    Today, your average desktop 3D printer is a mess of belts, leadscrews, and pulleys. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [DeepSOIC] is eliminating them entirely. How’s he doing this? With a linear stepper motor.

    Search Google for ‘linear stepper motor’ and you’ll find a bunch of NEMA-bodied motors with leadscrews down the middle. This is not a linear stepper motor. This is a stepper motor with a leadscrew down the middle. The motor [DeepSOIC] has in mind is more like a mashup of a rack gear and a maglev train.

    linear stepper motor 3d printer
    Eliminate belts, pulleys, leadscrews.
    https://hackaday.io/project/10537-linear-stepper-motor-3d-printer

    I wonder, why isn’t everyone using linear stepper motors for 3d printers? At least, no 3d printer I’ve seen so far… Maybe they are simply too expensive?..

    The plan: make a DIY linear stepper. Attach it to my printer. Try.

    If you are wondering, what a linear stepper is – it’s just like regular stepper, unrolled.
    Example: http://www.intellidrives.com/App-How-Linear-Stepper-Works

    ordered ferromagnetic PLA

    http://www.blackmagic3d.com/Magnetic-PLA-Filament-p/bm3d-175-mag.htm

    I’m very excited about this material. Can make motors, magnets for speakers, maybe even transformers..

    Why!! Why they don’t make ABS like this? PLA is perfect for printing, but it can only withstand +20-+30 deg.C temperature rise (with respect to ambient +20..+30). That’s nothing! ABS is +60..+70 deg.C rise, more than double! Nylon… well… so on…

    I did a crude measurement of BlackMagic3D’s ferromagnetic filament, and got permeability of about 2. That is hopeless.

    Reply
  7. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Mechanized One-Man Sawmill
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/16/mechanized-one-man-sawmill/

    The title of ‘maker’ is conventionally applied to the young-adult age group. In the case of 84 year-old Ralph Affleck, a lifelong sawmiller, ‘maker’ perhaps undersells the accomplishment of building a fully functioning sawmill that can be operated by a single individual.

    Starting in the trade at the age of 16 under his father’s tutelage, fifty years of working in sawmills saw him still loving what he did as retirement loomed. So, with pen, paper, and a simple school ruler he designed the entire shop from scratch. Decades of expertise working with wood allowed him to design the machines to account for warping and abnormalities in the timber resulting in incredibly accurate cuts.

    much of the shop is built from scratch with scavenged parts

    Vintage Mill
    http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2014/s4109955.htm

    RALPH AFFLECK: I’ve got a pretty good idea of how to build things. And I thought, ‘Well, golly.’ I’ve finished at about… Maybe about 66, 67, I finished my logging work. I was logging for another mill and I thought ‘No, I’ll build another sawmill. I’ll go ahead and build it.’

    TONY PEARSON, KILARNEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION: It’s unbelievable that someone could sit down – with a school ruler, mind you, a 30 centimetre wooden school ruler – and drew everything to scale. In 3D so that he knew everything would pass and rotate without getting caught on another cog or another piece of the machinery before he started building it. Incredible!

    Reply
  8. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize Entry: Measuring 3D Magnetic Fields
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/16/hackaday-prize-entry-measuring-3d-magnetic-fields-needs-prize-footer/

    Sometimes you have to start out with big goals. Ninth-graders [Finja Schneider] and [Myrijam Stoetzer] are aiming to make a magnetic field scanner that would be helpful in finding large underground metallic objects, like unexploded WWII bombs that pose a real threat whenever a new parking garage is excavated in Germany. But even big goals have to start out somewhere, so they’re gaining experience with the sensors and the math necessary to recreate 3D magnetic flux vector fields on household objects like sawblades and magnetized screwdrivers.

    For their science-fair project, [Finja] and [Myrijam] took a mid-80s fischertechnik “toy” 2D scanner kit, mounted a 3D magnetic sensor to it, and wrote some firmware to scan around and pass the data back to a computer where they reconstructed the field lines and made some nice visualizations. Along the way, they tried a number of designs, from a DIY chassis on carbon-fiber rails to sensors with ferrofluid. They document their successes and failures equally nicely in their lab report

    3D-Vectorfield Scanner for Magnetic Flux
    https://hackaday.io/project/12603-3d-vectorfield-scanner-for-magnetic-flux

    Instead of playing with iron fillings (9th class) we developed a scanner that maps magnetic fields in a 3D vector field for MatLab

    Reply
  9. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Open-Source Laser Cutter Software gets Major Update, New Features
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/17/open-source-laser-cutter-software-gets-major-update-new-features/

    The LaserWeb project recently released version 3, with many new features and improvements ready to give your laser cutter or engraver a serious boost in capabilities! On top of that, new 3-axis CNC support means that the door is open to having LaserWeb do for other CNC tools what it has already done for laser cutting and engraving.

    LaserWeb3 supports different controllers and the machines they might be connected to – whether they are home-made systems, CNC frames equipped with laser diode emitters (such as retrofitted 3D printers), or one of those affordable blue-box 40W Chinese lasers with the proprietary controller replaced by something like a SmoothieBoard.

    Performance in LaserWeb3 is currently best with Smoothieware, but you can still save and export GCODE to use it with Grbl, Marlin, EMC2, or Mach3.

    The project is open to contributions from CNC / Javascript / UX developers to bring it to the next level.

    openhardwarecoza/LaserWeb3
    https://github.com/openhardwarecoza/LaserWeb3

    Reply
  10. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Taming the Beast: Pro-Tips for Designing a Safe Homebrew Laser Cutter
    http://hackaday.com/2016/06/29/taming-the-beast-pro-tips-for-designing-a-safe-homebrew-laser-cutter/

    Homebrew laser cutters are nifty devices, but scorching your pals, burning the house down, or smelling up the neighborhood isn’t anyone’s idea of a great time. Lets face it. A 60-watt laser that can cut plastics offers far more trouble than even the crankiest 3D-printers

    Despite the danger, the temptation to build one is irresistible. With tubes, power supplies, and water coolers now in abundance from overseas re-sellers, the parts are just a PayPal-push away from landing on our doorsteps.

    Reply
  11. Tomi Engdahl says:

    DIY Motion Control Camera Rig Produces Money Shots On A Budget
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/18/diy-motion-control-camera-rig-produces-money-shots-on-a-budget/

    Motion control photography allows for stunning imagery, although commercial robotic MoCo rigs are hardly affordable. But what is money? Scratch-built from what used to be mechatronic junk and a hacked Canon EF-S lens, [Howard’s] DIY motion control camera rig produces cinematic footage that just blows us away.

    Using the Swift programming language, [Howard] wrote a host program automatically detects the numerous stepper and servo motor based axis and streams the position data to their individual Teensy LC based controllers. To the professional motion graphics artist , these shots aren’t just nice and steady footage: The real magic happens when he starts adding perfectly matched layers of CGI. Therefore, he also wrote some Python scripts that allow him to manually control his MoCo rig from a virtual rig in Blender, and also export camera trajectories directly from his 3D scenes.

    On top of the 4-axis camera mount and a rotary stage, [Howard] also needed to find an electronic follow-focus mechanism to keep the now moving objects in focus. Since the Canon EF-S protocol had already been reverse engineered, he decided to tap into the SPI control bus between the camera and the lens to make use of its internal ring motor.

    h’s homemade motion control
    http://howiem.com/wordpress/index.php/2016/07/14/hs-homemade-motion-control/

    Reply
  12. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize: 20 Projects that Make Us All Citizen Scientists
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/18/hackaday-prize-20-projects-that-make-us-all-citizen-scientists/

    We live in a time of unparalleled access to technology and this has the power to make life better for everyone. Today we are excited to announce twenty spectacular builds that use access to technology to move scientific exploration within the reach of all. These are the winners of the Citizen Scientist challenge of the 2016 Hackaday Prize. Themes tackled in this round include blood glucose monitoring, insole sensing for analyzing your footfalls, lab equipment like automated microscopy, sensors to measure the world around us, and more.

    Reply
  13. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hack Your Multimeter
    https://hackaday.com/2016/04/02/hack-your-multimeter/

    A good multimeter (or a few of them) is an essential part of anyone’s electronics workbench. The only thing more useful than a multimeter is a logging multimeter that can take recordings over time. And the only thing more useful than that is one that can transfer that data back to your computer for analysis. But fancy meters often cost a bit of money.

    [Kerry Wong] decided to take matters into his own hands and hack a serial-out port into his relatively inexpensive multimeter, giving him the ability to record anything the meter can measure roughly three times a second until he runs out of hard-drive space.

    Hacking DTM0660L Based Multimeters
    http://www.kerrywong.com/2016/03/19/hacking-dtm0660l-based-multimeters/

    Besides the ennoLogic eM860T, several other multimeters such as UNI-T 139C, Velleman DV4100, Tekpower TP40 etc. are also based on the same chip.

    One key feature of this chip is that most of the configurable parameters as well as the calibration data are all stored in an external EEPROM. This means that we could potentially change certain settings and enable certain settings (e.g. enabling UART communication, backlight duration, auto power off duration, etc.) by just changing values in the configuration EEPROM without having to do any hardware modifications.

    Since sigrok (a cross-platform signal analysis software suite) already added support for the DTM0660 chip, we can use the sigrok-cli command line utility to talk to the meter via UART/RS232 once we have the functionality enabled .

    To communicate with a PC I used sigrok‘s command line utility sigrok-cli. The available driver for DTIM0660L is velleman-dvm4100.

    http://sigrok.org/

    Reply
  14. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize Entry: What The Flux
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/18/hackaday-prize-entry-what-the-flux/

    Electromagnetism is the most difficult thing teach.

    [Adam Smallcomb] might not be able to explain electromagnetism with perfect clarity, but he does have an idea to give students a hands-on feel for electrons and magnets. He’s building an Electromagnetic Teaching Aid that turns 30 gauge wire, springs, Lego, and bits of metal into a toolset for understanding magnets, solenoids, current, and magnetic fields.

    The devices explained via [Adam]’s toolkit include a DC motor, stepper motor, speaker, solenoid, relay, transformer, microphone, and generator.

    So far, [Adam] has a bunch of interesting applications for magnets, wire, and Lego including a DIY stepper motor and a nifty little tool that measures magnetic flux with a Hall effect sensor.

    Electromagnetic Teaching Aid
    https://hackaday.io/project/11699-electromagnetic-teaching-aid

    A set of designs to facilitate teaching and intuitive understanding of the relationship between electricity and magnetism

    Ideally this would be something that anyone could build without buying extremely custom parts or needing fancy machines.

    Devices:
    - DC motor
    - Stepper motor (unipolar)
    - Speaker
    - Solenoid
    - Relay
    - Transformer
    - Microphone
    - Meter
    - Generator

    All of the code and designs are on GitHub and fully open source, I would love to see the collection of devices with support grow.

    https://github.com/Cloverstone/EM-Trainer

    Coming together
    A project log for Electromagnetic Teaching Aid
    https://hackaday.io/project/11699-electromagnetic-teaching-aid/log/38765-coming-together

    A set of designs to facilitate teaching and intuitive understanding of the relationship between electricity and magnetism

    What the flux?
    A project log for Electromagnetic Teaching Aid
    https://hackaday.io/project/11699-electromagnetic-teaching-aid/log/41340-what-the-flux

    I finally got around to taking some qualitative measurements to go along with the Hall-Effect sensor so I figured it was a good time to post another update. Here is the new component being added to the kit, it is a A1324 hall-effect sensor with an output voltage that is proportional to the magnetic flux density. This sensor is then mounted in a nose cone small 1×1 lego with three wires attached and female Dupont connectors at the other end of the wires.

    The reading from this sensor is now also displayed in the chrome extension included in the github repo.

    Reply
  15. Tomi Engdahl says:

    The Hackaday Prize 2016
    https://hackaday.io/prize/details#four

    Automation

    Starts July 11th – Ends August 22nd

    Automate your life. Program a robot to obey your every command. Build a device that makes breakfast or buys laundry detergent when you’re running low. Automatically track stuff, automate any process, build a Me-robot to do your every whim..
    Minimum entry requirements:
    Idea + image + documentation + 4 build logs

    Reply
  16. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackerspaces are Hard: Insurance
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/19/hackerspaces-are-hard-insurance/

    Do you dream of opening a hackerspace, makerspace, or co-working space? Maybe it’s in the works and you’re already scoping out locations, intoxicated by visions of all the projects that will emerge from it. Here’s a sobering thought: makerspaces are a great big pile of risk. If the doors of your ‘space are already open, perhaps you’ve come to realize that the initial insurance policy you signed doesn’t really fit the needs of your particular creative paradise. Even if it does, the protection you need will change as you acquire new toys.

    So why should you even get insurance? For one thing, your landlord will probably require it. If you own the building, you should insure it to protect yourself and anyone who uses the space.

    Why is it Hard to Get Insured?

    Getting a space insured is not an easy undertaking. While the task itself is hard for makerspaces, the concept of a community workshop is a difficult one for insurers to fathom. Most of their business clients fall into one category or another

    But makerspaces and hackerspaces tend to touch many categories—machine shop, wood shop, electronics lab, and so on, and every category presents its own set of risks.

    Another sticking point: most makerspaces are non-profit organizations. Some insurers I spoke with simply don’t cover any non-profits at all.

    To further complicate the picture, this is a group that has both shared and private resources and is trying to keep the private resources safe from theft and misuse. Most of this group’s valuable resources are tools

    Every landlord is going to require some type of insurance coverage. This should be spelled out in your lease.

    A landlord will typically require general liability coverage. This covers all kinds of bodily injury from slip and fall accidents to severed digits.

    You might want to consider additional types of property coverage depending on your location.

    buying insurance against equipment breakdown is a great idea

    What you want is someone who works for you. Someone who will take all the documentation you can provide about your makerspace and play the insurance game on your behalf. You want what is known as a broker.

    There is no off-the-shelf insurance model for makerspaces.

    Transparency is a good policy in general. The company is going to send an inspector at some point

    The fewer people with access to dangerous equipment, the more affordable the insurance premium.

    pass the cost on to the members. Makerspaces charge an average of $50 per month for individuals.

    Reply
  17. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize Entry: A Cheap Robotic Microscope
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/26/hackaday-prize-entry-a-cheap-robotic-microscope/

    The microscope is one of the most useful instruments for the biological sciences, but they are expensive. Lucky for us, a factory in China can turn out webcams and plastic lenses and sell them for pennies. That’s the idea behind Flypi – a cheap microscope for scientific experiments and diagnostics that’s based on the ever-popular Raspberry Pi.

    Flypi is designed to be a simple scientific tool and educational device. With that comes the challenges of being very cheap and very capable. It’s based around a Raspberry Pi and the Pi camera, with the relevant software for taking snapshots, recording movies, and controlling a few different modules that extend the capabilities of this machine.

    Flypi – cheap microscope/experimental setup
    https://hackaday.io/project/5059-flypi-cheap-microscopeexperimental-setup

    Pi + Picamera + M12 lens + Arduino microscope/experimental setup for diagnostics and scientific experiments!

    Reply
  18. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize Entry: A Simple Spectrophotometer
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/21/hackaday-prize-entry-a-simple-spectrophotometer/

    Building on the work of other Citizen Science efforts, [doctek]’s entry for the Hackaday Prize promises to detect pollution, identify chemicals, and perform other analyses with a simple handheld device. It’s a spectrophotometer, and [doctek] is putting some real engineering into this build.

    A spectrophotometer is one of the simplest devices able to perform spectroscopy, requiring only a light source, a photoresistor, and some means of producing monochromatic light. By putting a sample in front of the photoresistor, the absorption spectrum of the sample can be measured. With this data, it’s a simple matter to identify the sample.

    Spectrophotometer
    https://hackaday.io/project/12491-spectrophotometer

    Spectrophotometer design with a sensitive detector, bright light source and a sample holder. Easily and inexpensively built.

    Reply
  19. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize Entry: A Suite Of Lab Instruments
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/27/hackaday-prize-entry-a-suite-of-lab-instruments/

    For their Hackaday Prize entry, [Jithin], [Praveen], [Varunbluboy], and [Georges] are working on SEELablet, a device that will equip budding citizen scientists with control and measurement equipment.

    One of the best ‘all-in-one’ lab devices is National Instruments’ VirtualBench, a device that’s an oscilloscope, logic analyzer, function generator, multimeter, and power supply, all crammed into one box. There’s a lot you can do with a device like this, but as you would expect, the name-brand version of this isn’t meant for middle school students.

    In an effort to bring the cost of an all-in-one lab tool down to a price mere mortals can afford

    This has been a multi-year project for the team, beginning with a Python-powered instrumentation tool, and later a device running this code

    SEELablet : Instrument Cluster For Laboratories
    https://hackaday.io/project/12552-seelablet-instrument-cluster-for-laboratories

    Minimal, yet powerful combination of control and measurement tools integrated with an SBC running Python based UIs for science & Engg. Expts

    A Versatile Labtool
    https://hackaday.io/project/6490-a-versatile-labtool

    A cost effective, multi-pronged data acquisition tool to turn your computer into a workbench for science and electronics experiments.

    Python Powered Scientific Instrumentation tool
    https://hackaday.io/project/5971-python-powered-scientific-instrumentation-tool

    A multi purpose lab tool accessible by simple Python functions, and capable of studying a wide range of physical phenomena.
    Jithin

    Reply
  20. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Design for Hackers
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/27/design-for-hackers/

    Near the end of the lifecycle of mass-market commercial product development, an engineering team may come in and make a design for manufacturability (DFM) pass. The goal is to make the device easy, cheap, and reliable to build and actually improve reliability at the same time. We hackers don’t usually take this last step, because when you’re producing just a couple of any given device, it hardly makes sense. But when you release an open-source hardware design to the world, if a lot of people re-build your widget, it might be worth it to consider DFM, or at least a hardware hacker’s version of DFM.

    You want to make the assembly easy on them, but you don’t want to have to use through-hole components that are as big as your head and becoming more and more difficult to source all the time. What to do?

    That’s not a rhetorical question. What should we do? I’m entirely happy soldering surface mount technology (SMT) down to 0805 and 0.5 mm pin-pitch with good illumination and a magnifying lens, but below that it gets tricky. People who use solder paste and reflow can handle even smaller parts. But if you require reflow skills to rebuild your project, you’re also limiting the potential audience to a small percentage of Hackaday readers, much less the entire human population.

    Home etching is doable down to just about the same resolution as hand-soldering in my experience, but only with a bit of practice. Double-sided boards can be made to work at this scale with yet more practice. When your design gets complicated in these directions, you force the hacker to outsource the PCB fabrication. These days, that’s less and less of a problem, but depending on where people live it can introduce a delay even if it doesn’t add much extra cost to the project.

    Reply
  21. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Build a Foam Cutter Right Now
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/27/build-a-foam-cutter-right-now/

    Cutting foam is difficult with traditional methods. The best way is with a hot wire. If you read Hackaday, it is a good bet you can figure out how to use electricity to make a wire hot without any help. However, there’s something clever about [MrGear’s] minimal build.

    uses a 9V battery, a clip, some popsicle sticks, and the wire from a ballpoint pen

    This is a quick tool for short-term use: we imagine shorting out a 9V battery will require you to replace the battery fairly often.

    How to make a plastic foam cutter
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-4Umnbnn5A

    Reply
  22. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Make a Smart(ish) Watch From An Old Cell Phone
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/19/make-a-smartish-watch-from-an-old-cell-phone/

    Looking for a fun junk box hack? Have one of those old Nokia phones that (in contrast to your current smartphone) just won’t give up the ghost? Tinkernut has a nice hack for you: making a smart watch from an old cell phone. Specifically, this project details how to make a smart watch that displays time, date, incoming calls and texts from a Nokia 1100 cell phone display and a few other bits.

    http://www.tinkernut.com/portfolio/make-smartwatch-old-cell-phone-part-1/

    Reply
  23. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize Entry: An Internet Of Things Microscope
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/20/hackaday-prize-entry-an-internet-of-things-microscope/

    For their entry into the Citizen Scientist portion of the Hackaday Prize, the folks at Arch Reactor, the St. Louis hackerspace, are building a microscope. Not just any microscope – this one is low-cost, digital, and has a surprisingly high magnification and pretty good optics. It’s the Internet of Things Microscope, and like all good apparatus for Citizen Scientist, it’s a remarkable tool for classrooms and developing countries.

    The Internet of Things Microscope includes a scanning stage that moves across the specimen on the X and Y axes, stitching digital images together to create a very large image. That’s a killer feature for a cheap digital microscope, and the folks at Arch Reactor are doing this with a few cheap stepper motors and stepper motor drivers.

    Internet of Things Microscope
    https://hackaday.io/project/11429-internet-of-things-microscope

    We are updating the microscope using open source materials to make microscopy accessible globally

    Reply
  24. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Super Cheap Super Simple DRO
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/24/super-cheap-super-simple-dro/

    If you have an old manual lathe, mill, or even a drill press, a digital readout (DRO) is a very handy tool to have. A DRO gives you a readout of how far you’ve cut, milled, or drilled into a piece of work without having to stoop to caveman levels and look down at a dial. Here’s a stupidly cheap DRO for all your machine tools. It should only cost five bucks or so, and if you need it, you already have the tools to manufacture it.

    Super Cheap Digital Read Out (DRO)
    http://concretedog.blogspot.fi/2016/07/super-cheap-digital-read-out-dro.html

    So these digital tyre tread indicators are super cheap… I paid £3.99 for one and could have spent less if I was prepared to wait for one to be delivered from the far east. They are essentially a short travel version of the cheap digital callipers that are widely available ( and indeed have the output slot that people have exploited to create data logging calliper ).

    Reply
  25. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Cory Doctorow Rails Against Technological Nihilism; Wants You to Have Hope
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/25/cory-doctorow-rails-against-technological-nihilism-wants-you-to-have-hope/

    The majority of his talk centered around two argument styles: Denialism and Nihilism. Denialism is built on bad faith arguments. Despite overwhelming expert opinion, the denialists stick to their bad faith assertions: cigarettes don’t cause cancer, or climate change is not caused by man (or doesn’t exist at all). Even in the face of overwhelming evidence gathered, corroborated, and well explained by experts, a denialist argument blatantly ignores or falsely discredits all of that.

    Nihilism is what makes people think “they’re collecting data on everyone so we should all be okay”. It’s an Emperor’s New Clothes situation where otherwise sensible people are deceiving themselves.

    The EFF is at the beginning of a 10 year mission to end Section 1201 of the DMCA. But even larger than this is a movement to re-decentralize the Internet and all technology that makes use of it. Cory advocates two core tenets to take up right now in this fight:

    1. Computers should be designed to obey their owners. When devices receive conflicting commands from both a manufacturer and an owner, the owner’s desire must always win.
    2. True facts about computer security should always be legal to disclose.

    Reply
  26. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize Entry: Augmented Reality For Firefighters
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/24/hackaday-prize-entry-augmented-reality-for-firefighters/

    The core of the build is a Particle Photon, a WiFi-enabled microcontroller that also gives this helmet the ability to relay data back to a base station, ostensibly one that’s not on fire. To this, [vijayvictory] has added an accelerometer, gas sensor, and a beautiful OLED display mounted just behind a prism. This display overlays the relevant data to the firefighter without obstructing their field of vision.

    Reply
  27. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize Entry: Piezo Gait Analysis
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/22/hackaday-prize-entry-piezo-gait-analysis/

    Go into a fancy drug store, and you might just find one of the most amazing sales demonstrations you’ll ever see. Step right up, take your shoes off, and place your feet onto the magical Dr. Scholl’s machine, and you’ll get a customized readout of how your feet touch the ground. As an added bonus, you’ll also get a recommendation for a shoe insert that will make your feet feel better and your shoes fit better.

    [chiprobot]’s Alli-Gait-Or Analysis comes in. It’s that Dr. Scholl’s machine tucked into the sole of a shoe. It can be worn while you walk, and it can tell you exactly how your feet work.

    alli-GAIT-or analysis
    Cost effective insole sensor for diagnosing foot problems
    https://hackaday.io/project/11154-alli-gait-or-analysis

    This insole for a shoe will be able to track and log the walking/running gaits of a person, it is aimed for use in the medical field, being a cost effective solution to give doctors additional data needed for the diagnosis/treatment of ambulatory disorders, i.e. helping people to walk again.

    Reply
  28. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Quad Serial Adapter
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/22/quad-serial-adapter/

    Despite concerted efforts to kill them, serial ports are alive and well, especially in embedded system. True, most of them end in a USB port, these days, but there’s still a lot of gear with a DE-9 (it isn’t a DB-9, despite the common use of the word) or a TTL-serial port lurking around. [James Fowkes] got tired of managing a bunch of USB to serial adapters, so he decided to build his own FT4232 breakout board that would provide four serial ports from a USB connection.

    FT4232 Quad Serial Breakout
    https://hackaday.io/project/12736-ft4232-quad-serial-breakout

    I got tired of having USB to serial adapters everywhere, so I designed this breakout board – USB to 4 serial ports!

    Reply
  29. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize Entry: Reflectance Transformation Imaging
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/29/hackaday-prize-entry-reflectance-transformation-imaging/

    Reflectance transformation imaging (RTI), or polynomial texture mapping, is a very interesting imaging technique that allows you to capture all the detail of an object. It’s used to take finely detailed pictures of scrawlings on cave walls in archeology, capture every detail of a coin for coin collectors, and to measure the very slight changes in a work of art.

    RTI does this by shining light over an object at very particular angles and then using image processing to produce the best image. Despite being only a few LEDs and a bit of software, RTI systems are outrageously expensive

    RTI is simply shining light onto an object and taking synchronized pictures of the object from directly above. As you can imagine, putting LEDs in a dome is the obvious solution to this problem

    The electronics are as simple as an Arduino shield and a few MOSFETS, and the dome itself is an off the shelf component.

    Affordable Reflectance Transformation Imaging Dome
    A simple and inexpensive way to image and analyze subtle surface details on objects.
    https://hackaday.io/project/11951-affordable-reflectance-transformation-imaging-dome

    Reply
  30. Tomi Engdahl says:

    3-Phase BLDC Motor Controller will Run you $20 in Parts
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/29/3-phase-bldc-motor-controller-will-run-you-20-in-parts/

    If you’re an active shopper on RC websites, you’ll find tiny motors spec’ed at hundreds of watts while weighing just a few grams, like this one. Sadly, their complementary motor controllers are designed to drive them at a high speed, which means we can only hit that “520-watt” power spec by operating in a max-speed-minimum-torque configuration. Sure, that configuration is just fine for rc plane and multicopter enthusiasts, but for roboticists looking to drive these bldc motors in a low-speed-high-torque configuration, the searches come up blank.

    The days in the dust are coming to an end though! [Cameron] has been hard at work at a low cost, closed-loop controller for the robotics community that will take a conventional BLDC airplane motor and transform it into a high end servo motor. Best of all, the entire package will only run you about $20 in parts–including the position sensor!

    Low Cost Open Source Controller For Brushless Motor
    http://exoskeletonreport.com/2016/03/open-source-controller-for-brushless-motor/

    Reply
  31. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Books You Should Read: The Annotated Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/29/books-you-should-read-the-annotated-build-it-yourself-science-laboratory/

    Like a lot of engineers, I spent a lot of time in libraries when I was a kid. There were certain books you’d check out over and over again. One of those was [Raymond Barrett’s] Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory. That book really captured my imagination with plans for things as simple as a funnel to as complex as an arc furnace (I actually built that one; see diagram above), a cloud chamber, and an analog computer (see below). That book was from 1963 and that did present a few unique challenges when I read it in the 1970’s. It presents even more difficulty if you try to reproduce some of the projects in it today.

    Reply
  32. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Mycodo | Environmental Regulation System
    Bringing industrial automation and regulation to everyone.
    https://hackaday.io/project/11997-mycodo-environmental-regulation-system

    Since the dawn of humankind, we’ve battled against and sought to tame nature.

    This understanding led to increased productivity in all aspects of life. Industrial automation and regulation allowed control of the exact variables to produce the tastiest fruits, the largest mushroom flushes, the most exquisite cheeses, the most amazing beers and wines, and other products.

    This is what I want to make accessible to the average person, and enable them to be their own producers. Mycodo is currently being used around the world, by regular people, to automate in ways that were once only possible with industrial control systems.

    Originally developed for cultivating gourmet mushrooms, Mycodo has since broadened its use to various other applications and now runs on the popular and inexpensive Raspberry Pi.

    Reply
  33. Tomi Engdahl says:

    wireless microphone digital
    developing a digital wireless radio mic in both 2.4ghz and UHF
    https://hackaday.io/project/7686-wireless-microphone-digital

    The Wireless Microphone digital aims to be a professional UHF sub 1ghz professional wireless microphone with true diversity recievers and timecode ( merging from the timecode shield project ) I will start by using GFSK modulation ( around 200mhz rf bandwidth ) but will only use a simple IMA ADPCM compression for the incoming audio samples from I2S.

    The first prototype wireless radio mics 2.4ghz are using TI CC8530 modules from raytac.

    My first prototypes are using RODE lapel lavier mixs running on bias from supplied by the AIC3101 on a modified development board supplied by raytac.

    Reply
  34. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize Entry: You Have No Free Will
    http://hackaday.com/2016/07/30/hackaday-prize-entry-you-have-no-free-will/

    For his Hackaday Prize project, [Patrick Glover] is proving we don’t have free will. Will he win the Hackaday Prize? That’s up for the cold machinations of fate to decide.

    Arduino, EEG, and Free Will
    https://hackaday.io/project/12318-arduino-eeg-and-free-will

    Using an open source platform to investigate the “readiness potential” and what it says about human free will

    Reply
  35. Tomi Engdahl says:

    HardwareX Is A Scientific Journal For Open Hardware
    http://hackaday.com/2016/08/02/hardwarex-is-a-scientific-journal-for-open-hardware/

    Disruption is a basic tenet of the Open Hardware movement. How can my innovative use of technology disrupt your dinosaur of an establishment to make something better? Whether it’s an open-source project chipping away at a monopoly or a commercial start-up upsetting an industry with a precarious business model based on past realities, we’ve become used to upstarts taking the limelight.

    A famously closed monopoly is the world of academic journals. A long-established industry with a very lucrative business model hatched in the days when its product was exclusively paper-based, this industry has come under some pressure in recent years from the unfettered publishing potential of the Internet, demands for open access to public-funded research, and the increasing influence of the open-source world in science.

    Elsevier, one of the larger academic publishers, has responded to this last facet with HardwareX, a publication which describes itself as “an open access journal established to promote free and open source designing, building and customizing of scientific infrastructure“. In short: a lot of hardware built for scientific research is now being created under open-source models, and this is their response.

    http://www.journals.elsevier.com/hardwarex/

    HardwareX journal for open source scientific hardware
    http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/2016/07/25/hardwarex-journal-for-open-source-scientific-hardware/
    https://opensource.com/life/16/7/hardwarex-open-access-journal

    Reply
  36. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Rocking An Acoustic Guitar By Making It Electric
    http://hackaday.com/2016/08/03/rocking-an-acoustic-guitar-by-making-it-electric/

    Brothers [Armand] and [Victor] took their acoustic guitar to the next level, making their own pickups to turn it into an electric guitar. The result is that awesome electric guitar sound.

    The pickups are homemade magnetic pickups. Each string has a steel bolt behind it with three ceramic magnets on each bolt. A coil is also wrapped around all the pickups. That coil is what’s connected to the wires going to the amplifier. When a string vibrates, it changes the magnetic field in the pickup which induces a current in the coil and that is then sent on to the amplifier to be altered as desired and turned back into sound. Of course that meant the guys had to replace their nylon strings for steel ones.

    Guitar acoustic to electric : DIY Experiments [#4]
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51lM0OkzgIM

    Reply
  37. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Just FCC making life difficult for open source projects. They are pretty much guaranteeing that there will never be such a thing as ‘open source firmware’ for wireless devices on consumer hardware.

    FCC believes that people shouldn’t be able to fiddle around with transmitting radios without a license and are forcing hardware manufacturers to cover the costs of enforcement.

    Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/695994/

    Reply
  38. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Keytar Made Out Of A Scanner To Make Even the 80s Jealous
    http://hackaday.com/2016/08/04/keytar-made-out-of-a-scanner-to-make-even-the-80s-jealous/

    Do any of you stay awake at night agonizing over how the keytar could get even cooler? The 80s are over, so we know none of us do.

    Kidding aside (except for the part of not bringing the 80s back), the keytar build is simple, but pretty cool. [James] took an Arduino, a MIDI interface, and a stepper motor driver and integrated it into some of the scanner’s original features.

    A off-the-shelf MIDI keyboard acts as the input for the instrument.

    World’s First HP Scanjet 4C Keytar + Instructions on How to Build a Musical Stepper Motor in 60 sec
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1PMEyZcB8Y

    Reply
  39. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize Entry: A Visible Spectrophotometer
    http://hackaday.com/2016/08/01/hackaday-prize-entry-a-visible-spectrophotometer/

    Spectroscopy is one of the most useful tools in all of science, and for The Hackaday Prize’s Citizen Science effort [esben] is putting spectroscopy in the hands of every high school student. He’s built a super cheap, but very good spectrophotometer.

    The idea of a spectrophotometer is simple enough – shine light through a sample, send that light through a diffraction grating, focus it, and shine the light onto a CCD. Implementing this simple system is all about the details, but with the right low-cost lenses and a 3D printed enclosure, [esben] has this more or less put together.

    OtterVIS LGL spectrophotometer

    A super cheap decently resolving open source VIS-spectrophotometer. The cheapest in the OtterVIS line.
    https://hackaday.io/project/10738-ottervis-lgl-spectrophotometer

    The OtterVIS LGL is a cheap 3D-printed open source lens-grating-lens visible spectrophotometer. What more do you need to know?

    It’s so cheap it can be literally given away to public schools to help spark their pupils interest in science, or as a high school science project prize

    School budgets are tight and even cheap low quality low resolution spectrophotometers easily cost 700$ or more per piece. Acquiring enough equipment to be able to engage all students at the same time can be something of a financial challenge.

    I aim to keep the cost for the OtterVIS LGL under 100$.

    The OtterVIS LGL is a super cheap decently resolving entirely 3D-printable open source DIY spectrophotometer.

    I’ve aimed at keeping costs low and quality high.

    The OtterVIS LGL spectrograph is a lens-grating-lens design.

    The grating is probably the weak link, as I went with a very cheap diffraction grating slide

    The slit is comprised of to razor blades mounted on a ring magnet

    The first lens collimates the light from the slit. The second lens focuses the diffracted light onto the CCD.

    The grating constant is 1000 lp/mm and the lower wavelength is chosen to be 380 nm as the lenses start absorbing here. From 760 nm second order diffraction starts to overlap so 760 nm is chosen as the upper limit for the spectrum.

    The CCD (TCD1304) is 29.1 mm long and and with a bit of trigonometry we end up with an ideal focal length of 60mm for the focusing lens.

    Everything comes with the FreeBSD-license, except for the Nucleo F401RE which is under ST’s evaluation license.

    Reply
  40. Tomi Engdahl says:

    VegeTerrium
    A decorative indoor garden/greenhouse
    https://hackaday.io/project/10086-vegeterrium

    This is a small (30cm * 30cm * 40cm) terrarium I am building to have an appealing place to grow small plants, the end goal would be to have automatic lighting, watering and heating. The frame will be made of a nice clear acrylic

    Currently the Vegeterrium (a combination of vegetation and terrerium) is only capable of simulating a day and night cycle hardware-wise. This is accomplished through a control board involving an ATMEGA328, RTC and self built current drivers to power red and blue 15W LED chains (30W total). It is powered by a simple 24V power supply over an ATX cable.

    Reply
  41. Tomi Engdahl says:

    TritiLED
    Multi-year always-on LED replacements for gaseous tritium light sources
    https://hackaday.io/project/11864-tritiled

    Reply
  42. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Three Arduinos, Sixteen Square Waves
    http://hackaday.com/2016/08/03/three-arduinos-sixteen-square-waves/

    [Folkert van Heusden] sent us in his diabolical MIDI device. Ardio is a MIDI synthesizer of sorts, playing up to sixteen channels of square waves, each on its separate Arduino output pin, and mixed down to stereo with a bunch of resistors. It only plays square waves, and they don’t seem to be entirely in tune, but it makes a heck of a racket and makes use of an interesting architecture.

    https://www.vanheusden.com/Arduino/ardio/

    Reply
  43. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize Entry: Low Cost, DIY Thermal Imaging
    http://hackaday.com/2016/08/03/hackaday-prize-entry-low-cost-diy-thermal-imaging/

    A few years ago, thermal imaging sensors – cameras that could see heat – became very cheap. FLIR was going all-in with their Lepton module, and there were a number of clip-on cellphone accessories that gave the computer in your pocket the ability to see infrared.

    Fast forward a few years, and you can still buy a thermal imaging sensor for your cellphone, and it still costs about the same as it did in 2013. For his Hackaday Prize project, [Josh] is building a more modern lower cost thermal imaging camera. It won’t have the resolution of the fancy $1000 FLIR unit, but it will be very inexpensive with a BOM cost of about $50.

    LCIRIC – Low Cost Infrared Imaging Camera
    A standalone, open-source thermal imager which can be built for under $50 in parts.
    https://hackaday.io/project/11358-lciric-low-cost-infrared-imaging-camera

    Reply
  44. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize Entry: Helping Millions See Clearly
    http://hackaday.com/2016/08/04/3d-printable-slit-lamp-may-help-millions-see-clearly/

    Slit lamps are prohibitively expensive in the third world areas of India where they are most needed. An invention that’s been around for over a hundred years, the slit lamp is a simple-in-concept way to see and diagnose a large array of ocular issues.

    Since they are relatively old by technological standards, the principles behind them have become more and more understood as time has gone on. While a nice lab version with a corneal microscope is certainly better, innovations in manufacturing have brought the theoretical minimum cost of the device way down, or at least that’s what [Kewal Chand Swami] hopes.

    3D Printable Portable Slit Lamp
    A portable, cost effective 3D printable eye diagnostic apparatus
    https://hackaday.io/project/11255-3d-printable-portable-slit-lamp

    Reply
  45. Tomi Engdahl says:

    How To Build Anything With Delrin And A Laser Cutter — Advanced Tricks
    http://hackaday.com/2016/08/04/how-to-build-anything-with-delrin-and-a-laser-cutter-part-iii/

    Everyone wants their prototypes to look polished, as opposed to looking like 3D-squirted weekend afterthoughts. The combination of Delrin and a Laser Cutter make this easy, especially if you learn a few tricks-of-the-trade that will make your assemply pop, both functionally and aesthetically.

    Last time, we took a deep dive into fabbing parts with Delrin and a typical 40-watt laser cutter, and we discussed some of the constraints of the material. More recently, [Gerrit] gave us a close look at the material itself. It’s been about a year since our first post, but the list of tricks is far from complete.

    How to Build Anything Using Delrin and a Laser Cutter
    http://hackaday.com/2015/09/03/how-to-build-anything-using-delrin-and-a-laser-cutter/

    Need a simple fab process to go from a humble vector graphic to a final part — in a matter of minutes? The CO2 laser cutter might be the right choice. As these tools open themselves up to widespread use through hackerspaces, I decided to give Delrin some well-deserved time under the spotlight.

    Why Delrin?

    I won’t deny that I’ve seen posts about “laser-cutter techniques” before. Nevertheless, most of these past articles tend to focus on either acrylic or wood as the “material of choice,” and not all of those techniques are transferable across materials. Delrin, when compared to acrylic, is far more ductile, and, when compared to wood, is a far better approximation of a continuum. These two characteristics enable a number of additional design techniques that are either impractical or difficult to accomplish with materials like acrylic and wood.

    Delrin, because of its flexibility, is much more willing to deform to accommodate press fits.

    This fact is a lifesaver for hobbyist laser cutters. What this means is that even if our laser cutter has slightly less precision, we can still achieve a press fit between two Delrin parts (or just one part made from Delrin) because of Delrin’s willingness to deform to the shape of another part. As a back-of-the-envelope rule, if your laser cutter can hit relative dimensions between features that are ±0.001 in. (0.0254 mm), just undersize the hole (or other press-fit geometry) slightly smaller than you would for a conventional press-fit, and the Delrin will still be able to expand and hold the part firmly.

    Delrin is easily machined

    Thread-Forming

    With any seasoned technique, the “gurus who came before us” have developed a tool for just the situation. In this case, the tool is a steady line of thread-forming screws, enabling us to screw directly into many materials without ever tapping.

    this technique also does not apply to acrylic and wood. Acrylic is simply too brittle to be cut or deformed by screw threads, and plywood will not thread predictably

    Delrin’s ductility makes it a good candidate for snap fits involving tabs and slots.

    Delrin is notoriously slippery, so we should expect pieces to slide easily if they aren’t secured

    Dubbed, the “O-ring Sandwich,” you too can make your own wheels in a pinch!

    In “real life,” Delrin has a reputation for its wear-resistance, and we can find it sold as bushings and even gears. Why let the retailers have all the fun, though? With a sufficiently high-power (60W and up) laser cutter, you can lase your own gears too!

    Reply
  46. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackaday Prize Entry: Diagnosing Concussions
    http://hackaday.com/2016/08/05/hackaday-prize-entry-diagnosing-concussions/

    Athletes of every age receive a lot of blows to the head. After a few years of this and a lot of concussions, symptoms similar to Alzheimer’s can appear. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Mihir] wanted to build a simple device that could be given to high school coaches that would diagnose concussions. He came up with HeadsUp, a device so simple even a high school gym teacher could use it.

    The origins of HeadsUp began as an augmented reality device

    HeadsUp, a Low-Cost Device to Diagnose Concussions
    https://hackaday.io/project/12232-headsup-a-low-cost-device-to-diagnose-concussions

    Diagnose potential traumatic brain injuries on the sidelines quickly, cheaply, and conveniently using a 30-second eye test.

    Almost half of all athletes don’t report feeling symptoms after receiving a concussive blow, and a total of 1.6-3.8 million concussions occur in the United States every year (estimated by the CDC).

    In order to address the major problem of undiagnosed and unreported concussions in youth sports, adult sports, and the mayhem of everyday life, we realized that a better system was needed—one that could be close and accessible, affordable for all teams, and easy to use.

    What it does

    HeadsUp uses a common diagnostic methodology, the tracking of patient’s eye movements in response to stimuli. The difference between HeadsUp and the cheapest hospital equipment? Cost. Commercial hospital equipment runs $5,000 at minimum, and can run up to $25,000, which means HeadsUp is hundreds of times cheaper.

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  47. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Building a Full-Spectrum Digital Camera on the Cheap
    http://hackaday.com/2016/08/05/building-a-full-spectrum-digital-camera-on-the-cheap/

    The sensor on your digital camera picks up a lot more than just the light that’s visible to the human eye. Camera manufacturers go out of their way to reduce this to just the visible spectrum in order to produce photos that look right to us. But, what if you want your camera to take photos of the full light spectrum? This is particularly useful for astrophotography, where infrared light dramatically adds to the effect.

    Generally, accomplishing this is just a matter of removing the internal IR-blocking filter from your camera.

    Making a full spectrum camera — Canon EOS-M teardown
    https://tinkerings.org/2014/10/27/making-a-full-spectrum-camera-canon-eos-m-teardown/

    I’ve been wanting a full spectrum camera for ages, but I didn’t want to risk performing surgery on my ‘proper’ DSLR to get one. But for $350, I’m just comfortable with my tinkering skills to risk the attempt.

    What exactly is a full spectrum camera? Well, a standard CCD or CMOS sensor is actually sensitive to more than just ordinary visible light. Camera manufactures well know this and try to avoid it, since to their customers it’s a nuisance if their photos don’t match what their eyes see. Even worse, since all lenses have some element of chromatic abberation, and don’t focus IR or UV light as well as they focus visible light, the extra light can often just show up as a ‘haziness’ rather than a clear image.

    Camera designers use two ways of combating this problem.

    ‘Hot mirror‘ — This filter blocks infrared from reaching the sensor. It’s located inside the camera, and is sandwiched just above the sensor chip.
    ‘UV filter‘ — This blocks the UV in sunlight from creating unexpected effects on the image. It’s usually an optional extra that’s placed on the end of the lens.

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  48. Tomi Engdahl says:

    A Peek Inside Andy Rubin’s Playground
    http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/start-ups/a-peek-inside-andy-rubins-playground

    Playground Global, an effort to make it easier for Silicon Valley hardware startups to make their ideas real, came on the scene in 2015. A group of investors including Hewlett-Packard, Google, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, Seagate, and others—and led by Andy Rubin of Danger and Android fame—backed the effort with at least US $48 million. The mission: create a hardware “studio.” It’s something more than an incubator or an accelerator, in that it allows inventors to focus on their gadgets and takes away as many of the barriers to doing that as possible .

    http://blog.playground.global/open-software-makes-hardware/

    Fifteen years ago, my company, Danger, spent $240 million to develop a production-ready smartphone. Today, a similar effort would cost just over $3 million.

    That’s within budget for an A-round startup, and it’s one of the reasons the pendulum of innovation is shifting from software back to hardware or, more specifically, hardware that uses software to do interesting things.

    Historically, teams I’ve worked with have spent an enormous amount of time and energy building the software stacks that enabled their hardware ideas.

    From operating systems to cloud services, these software stacks were often coded from scratch specifically to power the devices coming from companies such as General Magic, WebTV, Danger, etc.

    Inevitably—software schedules being what they are—the hardware was often ready before the software, and the product would have to wait at the factory until the software was ready to be flashed into ROM. Only then could we ship the final product to customers.

    Open source software solves some of these complexities and unknowns

    The sea change began when open software went mainstream. Gone are the days when proprietary software was re-invented each time an OEM built a new product. These days, software developers can take many core functions from vast libraries of established open-source code and combine it with their magical ideas to create something entirely new. And they can focus the majority of their time and talent on the magical new thing.

    Open software is battle-tested.

    Now, Android is powering over 1.4 billion devices, which means Linux is powering many, many more—the scale is astounding. You’d be hard pressed today to find a digital consumer product that doesn’t include some piece of open-source software.

    Many things about hardware are still, for lack of a better word, hard.

    But a maturing hardware supply chain is reducing the number of components a startup needs to build from scratch. At Danger, we built custom LCDs, as well as our own operating system and RF front-ends to enable our phones to run on different carriers’ networks. Today, Sharp or JDI will sell you a display, MediaTek or Qualcomm will supply you with SoC that include all the peripheral devices needed to build a phone. Want an operating system? You can use Android for free.

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