New Round Of Astronaut Or Not: Too Cool For Kickstarter

August 4, 2014 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

Round 3 of Community Voting has drawn to a close. This time around we had nearly 60,000 votes for 420 projects! The first voter lottery drawing didn’t turn up a winner, but on Friday we ended up giving away the bench supply. We’ll cover the projects with the top votes in just a moment, but first let’s take a look at the voter lottery prize for the new round.

You must vote at least once in this new round to be eligible for the voter lottery on Friday!

We’ve got so many prizes in the package for the fourth round of Astronaut or Not that we’re just showing you a few in this image.

On Friday morning we’ll be drawing a random number and checking it against the Hacker profiles on Hackaday.io. If that person has voted in this current round, they win. If not, they’ll be kicking themselves (emptyhandedly) for not taking part in the festivities.

This week’s prize package includes:

Now onto the results:

Continue reading “New Round Of Astronaut Or Not: Too Cool For Kickstarter” →

4-Minutes To Entry

July 26, 2014 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

If you think it’s too much work to write about your projects you’re simply wrong, and I’m going to prove it to you.

The first of this set of videos walks though the steps for submitting an official entry… I did it in under 4 minutes. The second clip covers the extra details you need to post to meet the requirements for the first cutoff on August 20th.

This is the bare minimum needed for your project to be reviewed by the judging panel. But here’s the thing: get your basics down early, then refine as you go along. The Hackaday Prize celebrates the journey of developing interested connected devices. From now until November you should be working on the build and adding to infor to your project post as you go.

Did we mention your odds of winning this thing are really good?

THP Hacker Bio: Kenji Larsen

July 24, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

thp-hacker-bio-kenji-larsen

I met up with [Kenji Larsen] at HOPE X last weekend, and I’m fairly certain he was the coolest person at a conference full of really cool people. Talking to him for a little bit, you get a sense of what it would be like to speak with [Buckmister Fuller], [Tesla], or any of the other ‘underappreciated, but not by people in the know’ minds scattered about history. I’ll just let his answers to our hacker bio questions demonstrate that.

7033431402348237268 [Kenji]’s project for The Hackaday Prize is the Reactron Overdrive. It’s not just one board he’s building here, but an entire suite of sensors, interfaces, and nodes that form a complete human to machines – note the plural ‘machines’ – interface. When you consider that no one knows what the Internet of Things actually is, and that [Kenji] is working on IoT 3.0, you get a sense that there’s really something here. Also, his project log has a Tron Recognizer in it. That has to count for something, right?

Interview/Bio below.

Continue reading “THP Hacker Bio: Kenji Larsen” →

New Round Of Astronaut Or Not: Most Outrageous Component

July 23, 2014 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

And so ends round 2 of Astronaut or Not. We asked you to vote for the projects “most likely to be used in other projects”. Again you didn’t disappoint. We had a mountain of votes, and happily gave away a Bukito portable 3D printer to one of the lucky voters.

You must vote at least once in this new round to be eligible for the voter lottery on Friday!

Vote for the project with “the most outrageous component”. Can’t figure out what we mean by that? Well, if you come across an entry that has a quarter-million-dollar hard drive in it… vote for that one.

Voter Lottery Prize:

BK Precision 1760A How long have you been making do with a hacked together power supply?

Be sure you vote and you could kiss those days goodbye with this BK Precision 1760A bench supply. It has three channels; 0-30V 0-2A on the first two and 4-6.5V 0-5A on the third. We’re also throwing in some leads so that you can be up and running as soon as it arrives.

We’ll draw a random number on Friday morning. If you have voted at least one time in this current round (your participation in previous rounds doesn’t matter) and your hacker number is drawn you will win! But if your number is drawn and you haven’t voted… no bench supply for you.

Now for the results:

Continue reading “New Round Of Astronaut Or Not: Most Outrageous Component” →

Judge Spotlight: Andrew “Bunnie” Huang

July 22, 2014 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

judge-spotlight-bunnie

This week’s Judge Spotlight focuses on [Andrew “Bunnie” Huang]. If you haven’t heard of him you need to pay more attention. His hacker cred goes way back to the original Xbox, which he reverse engineered and laid bare its security flaws. Maintaining his hacker spirit he went on to design and hack the Chumby. More recently he took on the challenge of developing and Open laptop called Novena. All of this while continuing to explore and experiment with all kinds of electronics, posting about his adventures for those of us that care about an electronics ecosystem that doesn’t shut out the user from tinkering with the hardware. Join us after the break for our conversation with The Hackaday Prize judge [Bunnie Huang].

Continue reading “Judge Spotlight: Andrew “Bunnie” Huang” →

Right Now: Your Chance Of Winning A Prize Is 66% Or Better

July 21, 2014 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

thp-unofficial-odds

Everyone who enters The Hackaday Prize is already making a statement that Open Design is important to them. But if doing things on principle isn’t your primary motivation, you do stand a really good chance of winning something. At least at this very moment you do.

We’re giving away 55 really awesome prizes, and “hundreds of other” prizes. Since we just passed 300 entries over the weekend, a bit of quick math shows that right now your chances of winning something are quite good.

Still not enough for you? Consider the top three prizes which offer a cash value of $10k. At this moment each entry has just under a 1 in 100 chance of placing. And a 1 in 300 chance of claiming the trip into space valued at around 250 grand.

Do it because you support Open Hardware, do it because you want to go to space, or just do it because the odds are really really friendly at this point! You now have until the evening of August 20th to document your concept of an open, connected device.

The Hackaday Prize Rules Update And Entry Date Extension

July 18, 2014 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

AMENDMENT TO HACKADAY CONTEST OFFICIAL RULES

Hackaday has been hard at work making sure the requirements to qualify for The Hackaday Prize are well understood. Recently we published a FAQ to help answer questions, and we updated the main contest page to make information easier to find. We are also publishing a pair of “walkthrough” videos that show just how easy it is meet these requirements. In light of these clarifications, and the availability of these helpful resources, we have decided to extend the deadline for entries from 8/4/14 to 8/20/14, and to make minor changes to a couple of requirements in the Official Rules. Here’s a summary:

Continue reading “The Hackaday Prize Rules Update And Entry Date Extension” →