Hackday editor Mike Szczys reminds everyone that it’s not too late for the Hackaday Prize:

Oh, walnuts! How can we already be at the end of the last round? 2021 has been a time warp and now we are staring down the final day to enter the Reactivate Wildcard challenge of the Hackaday Prize. You must enter by 7 AM Pacific time on Wednesday or it’s too late!

Of course the good news is that the topic is wide-open. Wildcard is for all the things that didn’t fit in the first four entry challenges.If it’s a good idea, if it’s a build that really matters, it should be entered!

The ten winning projects from this round will each get $500 cash prizes, and be shuttled on to the final round. All 50 finalists will have until November 7th to hone their offerings, at which point our slate of expert judges will pick the most interesting and impactful for the $25,000 grand prize and four other top prizes.

And how, you ask, will you find out who won? The Hackaday Prize Ceremony will be held online on November 20th during the Hackaday Remoticion. So your assignment today is to warm up that keyboard, mouse, and smartphone camera to get your project entered right away! Step two is to grab your ticket to Remoticon for a weekend of wonderful talks, great people, and an inspiring lineup of hardware builds that made this year’s Hackaday Prize truly shine.

Wondering what kind of stuff makes a great Wildcard entry? Majenta Strongheart has you covered in her latest video roundup below.

Katy Swordfisk writes about OreSat0:

After months and months of research, testing and development, the Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS) is preparing to hand off Oregon’s first satellite destined for the stars. 

Later this month, the interdisciplinary student group will deliver the satellite known as OreSat0 to Seattle’s Spaceflight Inc. who will integrate OreSat0 into its Sherpa(R) Orbital Transfer Vehicle. The propulsive vehicle will carry and deploy many small satellites to orbit after hitching a ride to space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, scheduled to launch no earlier than January 2022.

OreSat0 is the first in a series of three satellites designed by the Portland State Aerospace Society and is just about the size of a tissue box. The satellite includes solar panels, batteries, a color camera and an amateur radio system.

Andrew Greenberg, PSAS Faculty Advisor, said OreSat0’s mission is simple: “It’s supposed to not catch fire in space.” 

But OreSat0 also gives PSAS a chance to test their open-source satellite design before building the next iteration for NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative, scheduled to launch in late 2022. Think of OreSat0 as the training wheels for a tissue-box shaped bike speeding through space.

“Oregon doesn’t really have much of an aerospace industry so it’s really important that we’re bringing aerospace close to home, for college students and K-12 students,” said Catie Spivey, a masters in mechanical engineering student and member of PSAS. “We’re showing them that they can do it too. It’s giving all of us here the opportunity to work with NASA and with other companies, then we go into the real world and get aerospace jobs. We’re creating an aerospace workforce in Oregon when there aren’t many other aerospace opportunities.”

The second, larger satellite, being built for the NASA CubeSat Launch Initiative, is a mission for climate science. PSAS’s satellite will look at cirrus clouds and the distribution of cirrus clouds around the world.

“It also has this super cool STEM outreach for the entire state of Oregon,” Greenberg said. “High school kids will be building a ground station of 3D printed materials — what we’re calling the 400-kilometer selfie stick — that they’ll point up as the satellite comes overhead, the satellite points down at them and then beams live video of their location in Oregon to them.”

To add another layer of ingenuity, the satellites feature open source designs that Greenberg describes as “artisanally built” — meaning anyone can use them to build their own satellites. OreSat0 hasn’t been launched yet and already several universities have reached out to use the PSAS designs and collaborate on future projects.

“By publishing our designs it makes aerospace more accessible,” said David Lay, a senior in electrical engineering and member of PSAS. “These are incredibly expensive systems to just buy off the shelf so we’re letting people build their own with our designs.”

Read more…

An update from Hackaday:

We’re really excited to announce that Jeremy Fielding will give a keynote address at Hackaday Remoticon in November! Get your free ticket now!

The projects we in this community choose to tackle often take a lot to see to completion. Parts, tools, expertise, time; all are critical to getting projects from concept to reality. But how deep your parts bin is or how well-equipped your shop may be matters not a whit unless you’ve got the one thing that makes it all go: passion. Passion is what keeps a project rolling ahead paste the inevitable roadblocks and diversions; it’s what keeps us going back to the bench to try something new when we think we’ve tried it all.

The passion to understand, to create, to innovate, is something that Jeremy Fielding clearly has. Anyone who has watched even a few of his YouTube videos knows how much he loves to make things move. His current project is a seven-axis industrial robot arm, and it’s a seriously impressive build that could easily be mistaken for a commercial product. What’s perhaps most impressive about this is that many of the skills needed to pull it off, like welding aluminum and machining, are skills that Jeremy has been teaching himself on the fly. Talk about passion!

For his keynote, Jeremy is going to focus on building hardware that moves. Most of us are reasonably good at putting together projects that flash a few lights or perhaps move a few small steppers or servos. But scaling that up, as Jeremy has done for his robot arm as well as other projects, introduces new challenges: what type of electric motor do I choose? How do I figure out the trade-offs between torque and speed? Do I even want to use electric motors — maybe pneumatics will be better? What are my control options? These questions can be just as daunting to the old hands as they are to beginners, and Jeremy is going to focus on how to handle these and other mechatronic challenges that crop up in our projects.

Aside from the (literal) nuts and bolts of mechanical engineering, there’s another place where Jeremy’s passion shines through: his passion for communicating what he has learned. His presentation style and enthusiasm are infectious, and we’re sure that’s going to come across in his keynote. Jeremy fancies himself a “contraption engineer,” which is both an apt and engaging way to look at what he does. Fellow contraption builders take note — you’re going to want to make sure you don’t miss this one!

Call for Proposals is still open!

We’re still on the hunt for great talks about hardware creation, so the Call for Proposals has been extended to October 20. And remember, get your tickets early — knowing how many people to expect really helps us with infrastructure planning so we can give everyone a quality experience.

The mischievous main character of Goose Game can now grace conference badges thanks to this new add-on by Space Buck:

Horrible Goose SAO

It’s a lovely morning in the Supercon and you are a horrible goose.

Twitter user @Gnarflordius made a KiCad footprint of the Horrible Goose, so I turned it into a set of capacitive-touch boards that function as Shitty Add-Ons. All the boards are based on the Atmel AT42QT101x chips, which are out of stock everywhere right now. Sorry.

It’s interesting what you see when you train a black light on everyday objects. We strongly suggest not doing this in a hotel room, but if you shine UV light on, say, a printed circuit board, you might see what [Sam Ettinger] did, which led him to build these cool low-profile seven-segment fluorescent PCB displays.

As it turns out, at least some FR-4 PCBs fluoresce under UV light, giving off a ghostly blue-green glow. Seeing the possibilities, [Sam] designed a PCB with cutouts in the copper and solder mask in the shape of a traditional seven-segment display. The backside of the PCB has pads for UV LEDs and current-limiting resistors, which shine through the board and induce the segments to glow. Through-slots between the segments keep light from one segment from bleeding over into the next; while [Sam] left the slots unfilled, they could easily be filled with solder. The fluorescent property of FR-4, and therefore the brightness and tint of the segments, seems to vary by board thickness and PCB manufacturer, but it looks like most PCBs will show pretty good results.

Read more…

With the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon fast approaching, we’ve been hard at work crafting a schedule filled with thought-provoking presentations from knowledgeable speakers; precisely what you’ve come to expect from one of our events, virtual or otherwise. We’ve already announced that Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) astrophysicist Keith Thorne will be presenting a literally out-of-this-world keynote on the incredible engineering it takes to detect gravitational waves with the highest precision interferometers ever devised, but that’s only the beginning.

To make doubly sure we’ll be able to pack every available minute of our second Remoticon with fascinating content, we’ve decided to extend the deadline on talk proposals for a few more days to see what the late-bloomers can bring to the table. If you’ve ever wanted to present at a Hackaday event, but couldn’t swing the trip to Pasadena or Belgrade, this is your chance to take the stage virtually and show off what you’re passionate about.

In the meantime, we’ve churned through enough of the early proposals to let slip the first four talks that we’ll be beaming out between November 19th and 20th. There is plenty more to announce over the coming weeks, but hopefully this gives you an idea of what we’ve got in store for our global audience of hardware hackers. So grab your Remoticon ticket right now!

Read more…

Hackaday Remoticon: Call for Proposals Extended to October 20th https://t.co/rfX9rbaDV7

— hackaday (@hackaday) October 15, 2021