A Mountain Of Prizes For Projects Using These Parts

Here’s your chance to bring some great stuff home from The Hackaday Prize. For the next 3 weeks we’ll be looking for the best entries using Atmel, Freescale, Microchip, and Texas Instruments parts.

Each of the four contests (yes, four running concurrently) will award the top 50 projects. That’s 200 in total being recognized. The odds are really in your favor — currently some of those lists have less than 50 projects on them — so enter yours right away! Scroll down to see the mountain of prizes that we have for this epic run.

Make Sure We Know About Your Entry

There are two things you need to do to be eligible for this pile of awesome stuff:

  1. Enter your project in the 2015 Hackaday Prize
  2. Leave a comment here with a link to your project and we’ll add it to the list

Do this by the morning of Monday, June 29th to make sure you’re in the running. We’ve been diligent about adding entries to the lists for Atmel, Freescale, Microchip, and Texas Instruments but at the rate new entries have been coming in it’s easy to miss one here or there. Don’t be bashful about asking to be added to these lists!

The prerequisite is to be using a part from one of these four manufacturers. We’ll be looking at these lists for projects using great ideas which have also been well-documented. Tells us why you’re building it, what it does, how you came up with the idea… you know, the whole story!

The Loot

Up for grabs in each of the 4 contests are:

3x Mooshimeters which is a multimeter that uses your smartphone as a wireless readout.

2x DS Logic analyzers which [Adam] reviewed a few weeks back.

15x Stickvise to hold your PCBs (and other things) in place while you work

A continuation of what we’re giving away in each of the 4 contests:

10x Bluefruit LE Sniffers to help you figure out what’s being transmitted by your BTLE devices

10x Cordwood Puzzles; grab your iron and tackle this head-scratching soldering challenge

10x TV-B-Gone is an iconic invention from [Mitch Altman]; one button turns off all TVs


The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

86 thoughts on “A Mountain Of Prizes For Projects Using These Parts

  1. Congratulations HaD; you are finally doing what every other corporate sponsored forum (43oh, avrfreaks, etc) is doing. I for one welcome our corporate overlords.

      1. meh, yes and no. I’ve done the opposite since corporate takeover of HD occured, less online more IRL, definitely more rewarding than reading hackaday comments on why whatever you did sucks/could be better/could kill people/could be sold for clicks on Hackaday.com

    1. It is already better than last year’s contest already as last year as people that work on their project get a chance to win something at the early stages. Last year, only the 50 or so projects that made it to the semifinal were rewarded, the rest just get T-shirts and NADA for all their work.

      May be the sponsors should cough up some free development boards (if available) or samples related to their parts used in the project too.

      1. TI no longer give away free samples on their website outside of University or work related. So them being a sponsor, they really need to make it easier for people to use their parts.

        *Relevant* Development boards or free samples that are for *specific parts* that are used in individual projects in the contest – not just generic development boards. e.g. if I am only using their power supply, (while it is always nice) but it is point to get unrelated development boards.

        Also not everyone can make it to a hackathon also it is not directly related to the contest.

        1. Sooooo in order for people to use their products, they should give them away for free? I can understand promoting a product with free samples, but supporting the entire hacker community by just giving away all of your product for free is a TERRIBLE business plan… I don’t see any of the other manufacturers giving away all of their product

        2. I posted twice and did not say everyone… Must be something on your end?

          There are only 500 or so projects (so far) for the *contestants’ projects* and even then it is not every of those project uses their parts.

          Let’s say there are 1000 projects at the contest deadline and 1/3 of them are using a particular sponsor’s part. If they are spending $50 per project that uses their parts, the total is only at $1500. Given the google search result page placement for all the projects posted, that’s not a bad marketing. I would assuming that a small change compared to what they are spending as “sponsors”.

    2. Yeah, have you not noticed our emphasis on open source around here? This is one huge way of getting people to try making their own projects open source so others can learn from them and develop great new stuff after being inspired by them.

  2. These HAD contest are getting exhausting. Half of your content now is self-references. Not a year ago, post were exclusive hacks and stayed on the frontpage for at least a day. No because of all that content rumbling the posts rush down the frontpage to the second page quite fast.

    1. We are posting the same number of posts per day as we have been since the end of 2013; 8 per day. And no, half of our posts are not self-referencing. If you’re referring to the projects we cover which are posted on Hackaday.io, that’s because there’s great stuff there, why wouldn’t we cover it?

      1. I LOVE hack a day. I refuse to say anything too negative.. Except: some of the .io features are barely started, let alone useful hacks.

        I understand the reasons, and think they are not good enough to feature barely started, semi-illogical hacks just because they are on .io.

        The obscure projects hiding on random websites are way more inspiring and interesting than a barely started project with no images, code, or nothing, on .io..

        That said, keep doing exactly what you guys think is best. Will be interesting to see what happens here!

        1. How’s this for a crazy idea: make something fun with one of those devkits. Do it the easy “not a hack” way, where you just put the whole devkit permanently inside whatever fun thing you make. Make it into an art installation, or a fun gift for a group or hackerspace, or some other temporary use that’s fun and entertaining for real people.

          Rinse and repeat with other devkits!

          Really, it’s a lot of fun, and so very easy when you don’t treat every project like it’s some sort of “true engineering” task designed for high volume manufacturing. Go ahead, use 32 bit processor just to blink some LEDs or do something that could have been made with a 555 timer and opamps (and dozens of hours of “real” work).

          Just make something fun and entertaining. Even give it away. It’s amazing how much fun it can be when you can just do something awesome that’s fun and interesting, without worrying that you’re underutilizing a powerful devkit. It’s also a great way to use them up, and way more fun than having they laying around collecting dust.

          1. hmm lets see! :)

            what like help start a hackerspace and put them all in there , give away 60+ devkits for free at hackaday/layerone events in the last two months that are paid for out of my own pocket, run a security conference with a hardware hacking village, help out defcon HHV for 5 plus years? make hackable conference badges and give away dev boards, serial convertors, esp8266s (possiblly even fake ones), run eagle classes, make youtube videos, teach smd classes, teach electronics, fund hardware etc etc etc.. i’ve had quite a few articles on HAD too. One of my PCB designs is shown in the article btw.

            i barely have time to build anything for myself ;) but i still do from time to time..

        2. If that is the case, then there’s something useful you can do for the community. If you win a board you don’t want, give your store code to someone whose project you think is worthwhile. This is a win win for everyone. You get to be a judge for a day, your drawer doesn’t get filled with more stuff you don’t want, and the person who you give it to will be eternally grateful. Just my two cents.

      1. I don’t have anything to swap, but here’s a thought.
        How about hackaday provides an option to forgo gifts in exchange for an appropriate amount of free samples/store credit from the sponsors? Might benefit a lot of developers. Freedom of choice and all that.

        1. I imagine it’s more financially prudent for them to offer some gifts over others. Might be they have a pile of unsold cordwood puzzles hanging around, for example. Also manufacturers, whether it’s Freescale or some independent guy, want to promote a specific product, so that’s what the prizes have to be.

          This is normal in most competitions, nobody just gives away cash, or credit. The organiser gets some cheap / free booty to give away and promote themselves, and the manufacturer gets publicity.

      1. Real jigsaw puzzle hackers dont look at the box.

        They also make their own puzzle from paper they milled from trees they fell in a field they planted.

        You know.. “Real Hackers”

        1. A woman I chatted on the bus with once, had recently returned from a jigsaw puzzle contest.
          The contestants were not given a picture to work from.
          Each team consisted of two people.
          The competition required the contestants to build the puzzle “face up”!
          (many jigsaw mfgrs use the same template for their puzzles and loyal fans are able to assemble them “face down” by recognizing the shapes)
          I don’t recall the piece count of the puzzle (500? 1000? 1500?)
          The winning team completed their puzzle in 15 minutes, they worked barefoot (that allowed them to notice if a piece fell on the floor, and they could pick it back up by having it stick to their feet).

  3. So we have prises for PIC, Atmega, STM and MSP micro-controllers. My current projects are built in VHDL. No prises for Altera or Xilinx. I guess I wont be entering yet again.

    1. Looking at the clump of hardware I am currently programming, I have: SST FLASH RAM, Cypress SRAM and Altera CPLD oh and there is a 3 pin reg in there but I don’t know who made it.

      SST is made under licence from Microchip so I don’t know if that qualifies but FLASH is FLASH. There is nothing noteworthy about it.

      In any case the gust of the thing is Altera.

      The SRAM is also noteworthy. Cypress make good high speed chips and with a 200MHz CPLD they’re a good match. (although the SRAM is 10nS / 100MHz).

    2. You realize we’ve been giving away prizes for weeks, and will continue to do so when this 3-week run is up. Oh, and the trip to space and other finalist prizes ($10k, $10k, $5k, $5k)… plus the $100,000 for best product.

      So if you choose not to enter, that’s fine. But don’t do it because you don’t the current “weekly” theme.

    1. I know you’re just making a joke, but honestly the Microchip family of PIC microcontrollers are my favorites — they’re full of peripherals, very quick, and generally have very high amounts of RAM compared to other microcontrollers. The MPLAB 8.x IDE and ICD3 are actually my favorite development environment and debugging tools of any platform, they’re just ridiculously simple and streamlined, and debugging is extremely quick. I’m not sure what they were thinking with MPLAB X (I find the workflow very clunky and it’s very buggy in my experience — if/when the ICD3 is able to connect it barely stays connected for a few minutes), but MPLAB 8.x is still available for download, you can connect it to their hot-off-the-shelf compiler, and everything runs very smoothly! The Microchip forums are also very active, and if you have an issue that’s not covered in the documentation, there are often posts about it in the forum.

        1. I think most of the 16-bit and 32-bit series (i.e. all series other than the original 8-bit PICs) are much quicker. The PIC32’s get approximately 1 DMIPS / 1Mhz clock, and the dsPICs and PIC24s are plenty fast, too.

          1. Thanks, Peter.
            I have about 10 different types of PIC chips here but I think they’re all 8 bit and four clocks per instruction. I will give a 16 or 32 bit a go. I haven’t really used PIC’s recently, been busy with ATmega’s.

  4. I totally support everything hackaday is doing the future is open source, and the fact that the majority of the projects are not completed means you can collaborate with others who are good in their specific field. As someone who is mechanically and chemically adept i have very little electronics experience but hackaday.io has already connected me with people that are. If you can’t see that truly great endeavors require multiple people working on something and not just one guy soldering and programming in his basement then I really am not sure open source sharing is good for you.

  5. Big fan of the contest here at HAD. I have put in many more hours building skills because there is a chance of getting a few small prizes. My time is worth way more that the prize I got so far, but the skills I have learned in the process are very valuable to me. The mini prize giveaways are a great idea. Not sure why there are so many haters out there. I like how accessible the contest is, I will probably not be a finalist, but love the fact that we can all play. It would be great if every company ever could just sponsor us and give us free stuff, but that fact that we have as many sponsors as we do is awesome. I would like to do some mbed stuff, but am not going to fault HAD for no lining up all sponsors, HAD has a lot of sponsors and it’s great. If you don’t like the current state, get involved to the extent that you have a larger voice and then improve the process.

  6. My project uses a PIC18F2550 from microchip, is name AccessB and it uses two C# class files that give access to the peripherals on the PIC, so you can make applications in visual studio C# that can use the 20 GPIO, ADC, SPI, I2C, PWM, etc from the PIC, so you can implement a 20 pin parallel port or a I2C/SPI memory reader/writter or connect an analog sensor and retrieve the data from the PIC and save it on the PC or process it, anything that you want to do with the data.

    https://hackaday.io/project/4091-access-b

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