150,000 Members Strong, Hackaday.io Flies Past Another Milestone

We’re growing so fast that soon your mom will be on Hackaday.io. That’s fine, everyone who loves hardware is welcome. 150,000 members have made Hackaday.io a home for their creativity — looking for inspiration in the work of others, sharing successes and temporary failures, and building their dream team to take on amazing new challenges. There is no place in the world that can come close to matching the Open Hardware ecosystem that is Hackaday.io.

What is in that one number, 150k? It is a monumental chunk of a much bigger picture: the thriving Hackaday ecosystem that spans from staking down your own workshop full of projects and skills, to following the editorial pulse of hardware used in new and creative ways. Looking over the last twelve months on all of the Hackaday sites we’ve seen about 18.5 Million visitors and registered nearly 85 Million views. Hackaday is not a passive community. We all have an insatiable hunger to delve into the next big trick, and to celebrate the accomplishments that made it happen.

Want to find a new and unique way to use the tech you find most interesting? Your leap forward needs input to pollinate the idea. Hackaday has a critical mass of hackers, designers, and engineers waiting with excitement to hear and help out in exploring and expanding the frontier. These interaction are what has packed Hackaday.io with interesting people. Most would say: I came for a specific hack or to see what a particular hacker was up to, but then I felt at home and decided to stick around and share what I’ve spent way to much time doing (but I wouldn’t have it any other way).

As we continue to knock down one membership milestone after another I want to thank you all for being involved, for valuing the free and open sharing of information and ideas, and for sharing your own time and talent. You are what moves this community of hardware hackers to dizzying heights of excellence and awesome.

This is all too good to be a secret. Talk to your hardware-loving friends, colleagues, family, and acquaintances and invite them to Hackaday.io if they’re not already with us.

21 thoughts on “150,000 Members Strong, Hackaday.io Flies Past Another Milestone

  1. If my mother joins hackaday.io then it will be 147 projects on Dancing with the Stars hacks…I don’t know, an Arduino polling that counts how many times my father sighs and shifts in his seat while having to hear how sloppy Elga Dancingname’s performance was instead of watching the Patriots?

    150,000 people means, it’s time for Battle Hacks! People are split in to hackets (brackets) and battle hacks to the death until one is left standing…or seated in most of our soldering cases.

  2. 150 people with actual projects going. the rest are place holders. I can’t make heads or tails of HaD.IO. there are few if any of what I would call “detailed” build logs on there. Most of it seems like:

    This is my light build project:

    Parts used: glass, metal

    The End.

    It just seems like yet another poorly designed repository of garbage that people will use because there is nothing else out there, kind of like github. Just a huge mess of poorly designed webpage that would take the average person years to figure out how to really use it. But people put up with it because there is not much else out there and knowing much about it means you “must be smart”. The mental picture I have in my head when most people say “Open Source” is a bicycle made out of old, used, 2X4 lumber with nails sticking out everywhere and duct taped together. Very rarely is anything polished.

      1. Some people/companies game with google ranking by making an account on HaD.io even though they have no projects remotely related in the area. I saw a car rental company account the other day… And yes, I also saw (and reported) hooker and black jack too.

    1. You have to take the good with the bad, and encourage under-documented or unfinished projects to keep at it. Don’t look at HaD.io as a passive entertainment source. It’s a real community. We help each other out every day and a good number of projects on the site are world-class as a result. Open-source hardware is still a young concept and difficult as hell to get right.

      As a side note, my favorite response to folks complaining about low-quality projects: Put up or shut up. And don’t brag about your fancy work accomplishments and then hide behind some horseshit NDA, that doesn’t count.

      1. I’ve offered a couple of comments that were appreciated, on projects with stuff I have experience of. Not really into doing formal projects myself, did one recently but fell through for reasons to do with the person it was made for. Generally I just tinker with stuff.

        For the spam, might just be general WordPress spam? Much spamming nowadays is automated packages, I would guess that they have included lists of places to try posting to, WordPress sites being one. Blackjack and hookers are handy though, saves them having to add them to your own project. In fact forget the project.

    2. 1. HaD.io is yes, a repository but NOT an obligated instructable for you. I have always seen it as a means of communicating your project (finished or other wise) to a like-minded community if for feed back or assistance or pure “hey look at me”. It is a sort of far more elaborate message board and not an MIT class room nor should it be.

      2. One has to ask what your purpose is based on your needs here then. Do you need build guides to reproduce all these projects? You should be taking small bits from each project you find interest in, not being a redundancy. If you need entire build logs for specific reasons then ask, but to complain that most don’t, how many are you actually needing logs from? Not as many as you inflect above.

      3. “Place holders” are people who may wish to follow people so that perhaps it may inspire them to create on their own…which I am sure you are as well doing on YouTube or Twitter or Facebook by following some one, though you contribute nothing back.

      4. Calm your tits…it’s a website and NO ONE is making you look at it.

      1. “Calm your tits”? I find that disturbingly offensive.

        I come from the age before blogs and youtube

        I don’t need an instructable, another thing that is well after my years….

        And yes, IO is still shit.

        I ask what the purpose of IO is, obviously its so attention whores can get validation OR assistance for those that need help.

        IO is still a confusing heap of shit. Sort of like you.

  3. I dunno there are some real problems with hackaday.io – I sure hope they don’t think it’s finished.

    Personally I find navigating someones project to be kinda difficult, it’s sorta a mishmash of information. It doesn’t read quite like a blog, and it doesn’t read like a Instructables page. I mean even trying to see all the ‘new’ pictures with a update is confusing – least to me.

    I mean stuff hackaday folks could do to innovate on the whole thing is:
    – provide version control (with option to mirror from bitbucket/github/etc.)
    – schematic viewer ( surely there is something smart that can be done to support a few of the big hacker EDAs like eagle,kicad,geda,etc )
    – gerber viewer
    – bom manager
    – some way of ‘forking’ a project, no clue how that would work.

    I think hackaday also needs to actually look at what people have and make some sort of rating so I can easily look at a project and know that there is a code base, a schematic, a gerber, etc. Lot of projects are just some pictures and you say “I want to do this” but there really isn’t enough information to go anywhere with it. And that’s fine, I think a site where you can post your weekend hack is cool, but sorting out that is kinda painful.

    Seems like hackaday really wants this to be the dufacto project log, but other than being able to be found on hackaday.io (and I guess maybe a bit easier on google?) why would I pick hackaday.io over a blog (lots of free blog choices) or github?

    Maybe none of these ideas are in the direction hackaday wants, but I don’t really know what they are trying to achieve with hackaday.io. I thought it was to provide something in between instructables and github.

    1. I like the idea of status badges on the project banners. I think this could be done in a way that rewards progress by making continued efforts stand out while attracting seasoned readers to struggling or nascent projects for assistance and encouragement.

  4. Ironically HAD.io web site is the antithesis of open source. It’s like giving a construction engineer some Lego blocks to play with.

    I briefly had some optimism when they announced an API in development but it turned out to be useless as a tool so that I could design my own (personal) interface to upload projects without having to use their web interface that turns me off so much that I just ended up walking away.

    If they made a decent API and let others design web interfaces then they may learn things to help them with the HAD.io site – just like things work in open source – you take something and improve on it are adapt it to a new purpose and then the next person adds their improvements and so forth.

    I love what HAD is doing and the things they want to achieve but that HAD.io site gives me cold chills.

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