Red Bull Creation Contest Results

72 hours of hacking came to a head with the completion of the Red Bull Creation. This years challenge was to build something out of junk that moves a human. It’s hard to pull all the aspects of the event together in one place, so here’s some links you’ll want to check out if you weren’t able to attend.

Tech Crunch has an overview of all the event winners. One of our favorites is pictured above. The spinning see-saw is not your average playground toy. Its built-in accelerometer waits for the forces to peak, then snaps a picture for later enjoyment. Techshop, a San Francisco hackerspace, took the team prize for their work on it. Don’t miss the video after the break

The overall winner was a team from Minneapolis called 1.21 Jigawatts. They produced a human-sized hamster wheel that pulled a small follower behind it. As you walk, the follower prints incoming text messages on the sidewalk, kind of like the chalkbot. We searched around for video of it, the best we could find is this one.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_cERJsDn3U&w=470]

[Thanks NeonDion]

9 thoughts on “Red Bull Creation Contest Results

  1. This competition was extremely fun! I suggest more of you guys compete next time! I learned to weld, decently too! The best part about the competition was the awesome teammates, every team helped another team, we all wanted each others creations to work, and we really enjoyed working side by side!

    Hopefully this won’t be the last.

  2. Hey peeps,
    This is Carter (the blue haired guy from Team TechShop). Stephen is absolutely right, the build was Awesome, all the teams helping one another to get the projects built, just a great group of people to work with/against :) The video crews wanted to play up the drama between teams as much as possible, but after designs were finalized and there was no going back, everyone I spoke with was More than happy to lend a tip/hand/piece of bicycle to the cause. A HUGE shout out to all the people that I met along the way!

    Anywhoo, John, what do you want to know? The largest thing about our build was that we spent almost the first 20 hours JUST drawing and planning. We didn’t have a single weld until day 2, and I think that really helped to pull off such a large project in that time frame. We knew by then that there was no way we could do this (relatively) safely without some additional steel, so we then went and scavenged from a few metal recycling centers and “Build it Green” recycling. We over built the whole thing and I’m sure now with a few tweaks that I’ll be able to hold 2 people per side no problem. The wheel mechanism isn’t quite fast enough, so we’ll be adding another gear reduction and a second drive, that way both the up and down action per side will contribute to keeping the rotation going :) We’re collecting and cataloging photos and footage of the build, so when we have a bit more, I hope to put a build page together. Ask questions in the meantime!

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