Above: Hackaday prize
Guided rockets. Raspberry Pi smart glass. A Unity Candle. Mobile 3D printers. These are some of the projects that hardware hackers have proposed as entries to win a free trip into space from do-it-yourself hardware site Hackaday.com. Hackaday announced the contest in April and it has received more than 138
Through its Hackaday.com website, SupplyFrame is offering The Hackaday Prize, a hardware contest where the grand prize is an all-expense-paid trip to space on a carrier of your choice. The call for entries is now open. The prize is a recognition of the growing movement of hardware hackers who celebrate do-it-yourself, innovative, open hardware projects.
The Raspberry Pi Smart Glass project is a kind of do-it-yourself Google Glass project that work with a small Raspberry Pi computer.
If you don't want the space trip, you can choose to get $196,418 in cash. That amount is a Fibonacci number, a specific set of integers in math.
Mike Szczys, the managing editor of Hackaday.com, said in a statement, “We’ve been receiving a wide range of projects that can be called serious, innovative, playful, and awe-inspiring. The core concepts of The Hackaday Prize are electronics that are “connected devices” and exhibit Open Design. So far the hackers working on these projects have not disappointed us. Some of the early entries have included a way to make your house listen to what you have to say, methods for making sure communications networks are easy to set up and available where needed, and even a concept for using swarms of mobile 3D printing robots to build domed cities.”
Above: A guided rocket proposed in Hackaday contest.
The winner can hitch a ride on any galactic space company. Carriers to choose from are the winner’s prerogative but it could be Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace, or perhaps even the World View balloon that’s ramping up to a launch. Other prizes include team sky diving, a paid trip to the Akihabara electronics district in Japan, and hardware-hacking tools such as milling and tooling machines and 3D printers.
The peer judges include some notable figures in hardware hacking:
- Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, Ronin, @bunniestudios
- Jack Ganssle, The Ganssle Group, ganssle.com
- Joe Grand, Grand Idea Studio, @joegrand
- Sprite_TM, Spritesmods.com, @SpritesMods
- Limor "Ladyada" Fried, Adafruit, @adafruit
- Dave Jones, eevblog.com, @eevblog
- Elecia White, Logical Elegance, @logicalelegance
- Ian Lesnet, Dangerous Prototypes, @dangerousproto
The preliminary submissions were accepted through June 28 for contestants over 13. The awards will be judged on the basis of actual physical hardware built, the ability to connect to the Internet, and the degree of openness based on the use of open-source technologies. The Hackaday Prize is sponsored by Pasadena, Calif.-based SupplyFrame, a tech and media company that targets electronics professionals. Its Hackaday Projects has 800 hardware projects go live since February.
The winner will be announced at the Electronica event in Munich on Nov. 10.
Some of the most interesting projects are below:
http://hackaday.io/project/1214-Project-Jarvis—A.I-Home-Automation-%26-Assistant
http://hackaday.io/project/270-CUBEX
http://hackaday.io/project/1340-SatNOGS—Global-Network-of-Ground-Stations
http://hackaday.io/project/1368-Raspberry-Pi-Smart-Glass
http://hackaday.io/project/963-%24300-Pick-and-Place-%2F-3D-printer
http://hackaday.io/project/1029-Powerduino
http://hackaday.io/project/1080-BuckyBot
http://hackaday.io/project/986-TRSI-Satellite-%2F-Devkit
http://hackaday.io/project/1150-Power-Monitor
http://hackaday.io/project/1552-LoFi
