Friday, September 18, 2015

Hackaday Prize Semifinalist: Helping Out In The ER | Hackaday

[Moldovanu] and [Radu] are out to fix emergency medical care in their native Romania. They’re developing a very inexpensive bracelet that keeps track of heartbeat, blood oxygen, and temperature of a patient, either in an ER or in the waiting room.

The Health Mate, as the guys are calling it, is a small bracelet loaded up with IR LEDs, photodiodes, a temperature sensor, and a WiFi module. They’ve wired all these parts up on a home made board, connected a battery, and are starting to measure their vitals.

It’s a simple device, but it’s simple for a reason: heart rate and blood oxygen saturation are some of the most important indicators doctors and nurses look at when triaging patients. By making their health monitor cheap and good enough, it eventually makes its way onto the wrists of more patients, and will hopefully save more lives

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Thursday, September 17, 2015

Over-the-top Hackerspace Donation box Brings out the Brony in you ...

“You’ll never believe how this happened, doc.” [Source: CRASH Space]If you’re going to pass the hat for donations to your hackerspace, you might as well add to the value proposition and give potential donors a little something for their generosity. And what better way to cash in than to channel the inner Brony in your donors with a My Little Pony themed dollar-bill vortex box?

Sick of the boring cheezy-poof jug her hackerspace was using as a donation jar, not-a-Brony [Michelle] was inspired by the CRASH Space mascot Sparkles, pictured left, to build a new box that will maximize donations by providing donors with a multimedia extravaganza. The Plexiglas box, resplendent with laser-cut acrylic hearts and spangled with My Little Pony stickers, is fitted with a sensor so that donations trigger an MP3 of the MLP theme song. A scrolling LED marquee flashes a gracious message of thanks, and to complete the experience, a pair of fans creates a tornado of the fat stacks of cash in the bin.

Putting a little [Twilight Sparkle] into your donation box makes good financial sense, as does providing incentive to deposit bills rather than coins. This project reminds us of our recent post about a custom claw machine which could be leveraged as a value-added donation box – just add a coin slot. And rainbows.

[Thanks for the tip, SamyKamkar]

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Sunday, September 13, 2015

A Gramophone For Your Pebble Smart Watch | Hackaday

At a recent Pebble-themed hackathon, one of the teams created a pretty cool device called the TimeDock Sleepeasy.

It’s a gramophone inspired docking station for your Pebble Time smart watch. And it’s not just a 3D printed mount — nope, there’s an Arduino inside! The team’s plan from the beginning was to make an interactive docking station for the Pebble that would allow it to talk to you without actually pressing any buttons on the watch.

It was rather tricky getting the Arduino Uno talking to the Pebble, but once they figured it out they had a lot of options for interaction — they ended up using an ultrasound sensor so you can just wave your hand at the TimeDock and it would tell you the time.

It’s kind of interesting how they set up the two devices to communicate. The Arduino sends a request to the Pebble for the time, and the Pebble replies with the time, and a request to say it. The team pre-loaded a bunch of .WAV files on the Arduino for various other notifications on the Pebble — when the Arduino sees what type of notification it is, it plays the appropriate .WAV file.

The whole hackathon was about making use of the SmartStrap interface which the newly released Pebble Time watches have — the basic concept is with this new piece of hardware, you can design and build your own SmartStraps to add extra functionality to your smart watch — like a heart rate sensor, GPS, etc. Not quite open source — but getting there! Now you can develop your own app… and hardware!

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