New Contest: Win One Of 20 Microchip Fubarino SD Boards

We had a blast with the Trinket Contest in October and November and can’t wait to see what you can come up with for this month’s competition. Microchip Technology is one of our advertisers and they offered us 20 Fubarino SD boards to give away as prizes. The challenge for you is to add our URL as an Easter Egg in your own microcontroller project. Rise to the top of our seemingly arbitrary system for picking winners and one will be delivered to your door for your future hacking pleasure.

Obviously we mean http://hackaday.com when we say URL, but what constitutes an Easter Egg? We figure it’s anything that is not apparently obvious in a piece of hardware. We built a quick example to get you thinking. Shown off in the clip after the break is a clock that displays our web address every day at 1:37pm. What did we pick that time? Because our clock displays in 24-hour time format and 13:37 is leet. See the code we used in our repo.

We thought of a few others, like making an embedded gaming that uses the Konami Code to reveal the Easter Egg, or a man-in-the-middle device that attaches to your keyboard and redirects your feeble attempts to load Facebook by closing the tab and opening Hackaday. The sky’s the limit with how creative these things can be!

Follow these rules to submit your qualifying entry:

  • You must somehow hide http://hackaday.com in your microcontroller project (embedded Linux doesn’t count unless you do some type of bare-metal programming)
  • Preference will be given to projects that are both clever and well documented. Notice we made a video, and posted code and an explanation of our project.
  • Write an email that has “[Fubarino]” in the title, includes the information on your documented entry, and lists your name and mailing address. Your name and mailing address will be used for shipping only and NOT for anything else. Emails should be sent to: contests@hackaday.com
  • Entries must be received before 12:00am Pacific time on 12/19/2013.
  • Employees and their families of Hackaday, SupplyFrame, and Microchip Technology are not eligible to win.

What are you waiting for? Dust off those chips and get hacking!

63 thoughts on “New Contest: Win One Of 20 Microchip Fubarino SD Boards

          1. Units:
            Dong
            Wang
            Ding a ling
            Ding dong
            Long dong
            100% all-beef thermometer
            Kielbasa
            Bratwurst
            Meat Popsicle
            Big Italian salami
            Meat thermometer
            Bologna pony
            Salami
            Sausage
            Tube steak
            Weenie
            Pork sword
            Noodle
            Banana
            Stinky pickle
            Magic wand
            Staff
            Divine Rod
            Magic mushroom tip
            Corn dog

    1. Totally absurd to suggest such a thing.

      The PIC32 is a microcontroller, just a more powerful alternative to the usual PIC and AVR controllers we see used, not for running a fully fledged operating system.

      Its like demanding that a 50cc moped has a 0-60mph time of 3.2 seconds and a top speed of 130mph.

        1. Thats great, but that isn’t android.

          Although I should have reworded fully fledged operating system as you could certainly write an operating system for the AVR and PIC chips I already mentioned and still consider it fully fledged.

          1. Not a case of wriggling out of it. Dude claimed nobody cares about PIC32 until it runs Linux/Android. It is absurd to suggest it will ever run android. I corrected my meaning of fully fledged operating system as what could be considered fully fledged would depend on the context, android on PIC32 was the context originally and isn’t happening.

            Therefore not particularly appreciating the slightly insulting and misuse of the term either.

          2. You know, AVR/TI/Broadcom all have chips in this class that can run a no mmu kernel.
            Android is referring to the 70% market share…

            Microchip screwed with the FOSS community by selling a modified gcc compiler, poisoned lib licenses, and ultimately lower value computing.

            I use their low-end PIC12/PIC16/PIC18 stuff all the time, but will not spend $1 trying to sugar coat that PIC32 turd deal for future developers.

            My statement stands as a fact, not a fair metric of current performance.
            “F” has anti-rhetoric technology…. maybe minix could fit… ;-)

        1. “Digital Unix” was a good name for an operating system, no chance for confusion with “Analog Unix”.

          PRIMOS is a good name for an operating system and also a good name for a pizza

          1. Long ago, there was a company named Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC, but they were commonly called just “Digital” (which they registered as a trademark, I believe). Their logo was 7 red rectangles, each containing 1 lowercase letter, spelling “d i g i t a l”, which is probably why they were commonly called only “Digital”, much like how International Business Machines is commonly called only “IBM”.

            Digital made the PDP-11 and VAX computers and VT100 terminals, which ran the early Unix machines in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As the Unix market expanded and other versions of Unix appeared (with distinctive names because they were newer and distinguishing themselves), it was pretty natural to call the Unix from DEC “Digital Unix”. They were, afterall, the company that made all the original machines that first ran Unix.

            Way back then, Digital was so well know that “Digital Unix” was understood to mean “Digital” the company, not digital the common English language adjective.

            But times change, companies go out of business (Digital went under in 1998, after single chips replaced entire machines, and their Alpha chip lost in the market to Intel’s Pentium). Today fewer and fewer people know that Unix really started on computers made by a company that was commonly called “Digital”.

      1. where it will also proceed to buffer, I am yet to have a single video embedded on hackaday actually buffer on either of my computers in chrome or firefox, only internet explorer and we all know how terrible it is to use that :P

  1. A PIC? Nope, not worth it even when free. Why spend any time learning an inferior chip with ~0% marketshare when cheaper and better chips exist in every category? ARM Cortex processors are better than this junk.

      1. Virtually every PC keyboard on the planet, ever made or ever to be made in the future.

        Sure, Microchip lost their market share to AVR.. but the key phrase is lost TO.. lets not forget that not long ago, no one ever heard of AVR, and the only REAL option in the DIY marketplace was PIC. (sure, there was hc11 and others, all with assorted difficulties to get working, but the market was weak and fractured). The only thing ‘inferior’ about Microchip vs AVR is their sluggish response to OSHW.

  2. Cool, be sure to update how entries are coming along a few days before closing. I have something I could do but it’s so similar to your example and would require me to write up a project I neglected to do a proper write up. Just cant get motivated to do all that work just to change the example from a clock to a thermometer.

    1. banggood.com (its actually a legit site, just with a somewhat dodgy name). Can get an arduino nano clone with free worldwide shipping for under $10 (was 8 last time I checked). Only difference between uno and nano is the physical size really and that the nano uses an FTDI USB>Serial converter (onboard) rather than a specially programmed secondary AVR microcontroller. Uno is of course a decentish size board with a set of female headers on either side for shields to connect to, nano on the other hand is a much smaller board with male headers sticking out of the bottom, it can fit on a breadboard.

  3. I came up with name. The Fubarino SD originated from Fair Use Building and Research (FUBAR) Labs. New Jersey’s first Hackerspace. It wouldn’t be a product of NJ if it was called the Happy Arduino Inspired Dreamboard.This board is for use in projects you wanted to make for Arduino but couldn’t because you only had one serial port. We have USB serial, plus 2 UARTs. This is 3.3volts which means no shift regulator for LCD screens, It has an on board SD adapter so it would run RetroBSD with no hassle. It nearly has as much IO as the Arduino Mega, In Anime/Manga terms it’s an SD inspired version of the Mega and manages to even be breadboardable. So it is actually a small board which is where “ino” comes from. So we avoid “uino” nonsense. That is how you get a Fubarino SD.

    1. I was considering using one of these in a project but I gave up when some info wasn’t so easy to find.

      My project is a ‘Z80’ retro computer but the best Z80 I can find is only about 5 MIPS. I then thought of doing it in VHDL but there no suitable boards with decent (and simple) RAM.

      Then I though I might as well write an emulator in machine code and also a cross assembler and run it on something more modern.

      Part of the project is video out and I thought that with something like this I could just bit bang the video through R/2R if it has enough MIPS.

      This chip says it has single cycle multiply and divide and a 5 stage pipeline but doesn’t mention the clock speed for the pipeline. Many chips have several internal OSC’s so the external clock speed often means nothing.

      The internal bus structure looks much simpler than many of the chips in this line but I don’t know if I can get around the RAM caching for the precise timing needed to bit bang video out (QVGA or VGA).

      Would this board do the job?

  4. Too little time to buy/receive a cheap arduino (or clone) -I’m based in Europe- and then figure out how to program it and then make something super to win this contest.
    I’ll wait for the next contest.

  5. Why do you ask for the mailing list for all entries? It seems like you only need to ask the winners for their mailing addresses. Having to give out a mailing address just to enter a contest seems a bit of privacy invasion.

  6. Unfortuantely I am out of town for the majority of this month, and have not been with my electronics to participate in this competition. I really like the idea though, and PLEASE hold more contests like this in the future!!!

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