We anticipate a cornucopia of hacks from the top fifty 2014 Hackaday Prize entrants based on the recent awarding of the 50 grab bags of electronics. That’s right, the grand prize was out of this world but there were a lot of other rewards worth shooting for. Instead of making hardware choices without the seminifinalists’ input we went with a shopping spree on Mouser.com.
It’s a great idea if we do say so ourselves. However, it turned out not to be as easy as purchasing fifty-grand in gift cards. Did you know that none of the major parts distributors have gift card systems built into their sites? We’re of two minds on this. We’d love to open a birthday card from grannie and pull out some chits that can be traded for chips. But at the same time, it would be a longshot for your non-hacker relatives to even know what sites are our go-to parts emporiums.
Long story short these prizes are themselves a hack. We had a lot of help from the sales crew over at Mouser who abused their account tracking software in order to make these credits work. All fifty of the Hackaday prize semifinalists now have a cool G to spend and we’ll be watching their Hackaday.io accounts for updates as they inevitably use the upcoming holidays to embark on exciting builds.
A big thanks to Supplyframe Inc. for sponsoring these 50 prizes, as well as all others awarded for the 2014 Hackaday Prize. Get those workbenches cleared off and sharpen tin your soldering tips because details about the 2015 Hackaday Prize will start to roll out in just a few weeks. Until then, occupy your time trying to win one of the many prizes offered during our Trinket Everyday Carry Contest.
Cool that you guys managed to get store credit for prized.
Now if only people start stuffing their prizes with Benjamin (or faces of politicians or Beavers etc), there will be a whole less line up at the return line after the holidays. If all else fails, there is always those prepaid credit cards and please say no to store gift cards.
The Chinese are way ahead of this for the little packet of lucky money they give out to kids in their New Year…
Wow.
Kudos to HackaDay for a clever (and awesome) prize that may have left me a wee bit jealous of the top 50 folks :)
tekkieneet, I think cash or a gift card would not have the same feel to it. It would come across as paid less than minimum wage for hacking efforts, whereas this prize is a reward for making an interesting entry that allows you to keep on hackin’ to your heart’s content. Just my $0.02
That is awesome, congrats to all who received those!
Lucky guys!
Hey, don’t forget to open the next Hackaday Prize to Italians as well, I want to participate, if not for the prizes, for the glory (I’m sure I’m also talking in the name of people that lives every other country that has been excluded from the contest)
Sadly the countries we excluded generally had rules about competitions that made it incredibly difficult for us to run the contest there.
Have a look at this set of slides to see just why organizing a contest for the public in Italy is such a nightmare.
http://www.slideshare.net/Promosfera/sweepstakes-and-contest-in-italy
What a mess!
Wow, what a huge pile of red tape! I wonder just how they think draconian laws like this actually protect their citizens.
Now I hate my country a little bit more. Thanks Italy for being such a closed-minded country. Time to change nationality!
Does this at least mean that in Italy, there are no “CLICK HERE TO WIN A FREE IPAD!” links ?
There might be, but owners of those links are awarded cool $0.5mil fine
“Italy fines TripAdvisor €500,000 over false reviews”:
http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2014/dec/23/italy-fines-tripadvisor-500000
Nice! I look forward to seeing what new projects the prize money generates!
Thanks for making it happen! We’re having a good discussion about how we can upgrade our electronics area at Sector67 with nicer tools and more of the components we use a lot.