We’re Giving Out 125 Teensy-LC Boards This Week

This week we’re giving away 125 Teensy-LC Boards. You’ve sat on the sidelines long enough. Time to write down your Hackaday Prize idea and get it entered!

It isn’t just the big prize (a trip into space) on the line. Each week we’re giving away things to help your build. Below you can see the 50 projects which won a LightBlue Bean from last week’s giveaway. This week it’s a huge number of Teensy-LC boards going out to those who need them. These little wonders pack a real punch, with a 48 MHz ARM Cortex-M0+ that has 62K of flash, 8k of RAM, plenty of IO and a 12-bit analog module for both input and output! You’ll also be eligible for each of the future weekly giveaways… we’re distributing $50,000 in prizes to hundreds of projects over 17-weeks!

Entering is easy. Write down your idea to help solve a problem faced by a wide range of people. Start fleshing out your build plan. Pictures are a huge help, even if they’re just a hand-drawn sketch on some paper! Your best bet at getting recognized for a giveaway is to post a new project log which mentions how you would add this Teensy board to your creation.

Last Week’s 50 Winners of a LightBlue Bean

50k-in-play-lightblue-bean

Congratulations to these 50 projects who were selected as winners from last week. You will receive a LightBlue Bean which combines Bluetooth LE with an ATmega328 in a nice little package ready for prototyping. Don’t forget to post pictures and information about what you build with these little wonders!

Each project creator will find info on redeeming their prize as a message on Hackaday.io.


The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

49 thoughts on “We’re Giving Out 125 Teensy-LC Boards This Week

  1. If you need this board your HaD entry you’re already starting too late to win anything. The prize winners are already determined by now; they just to be named and chosen by the judges.

        1. LOL. I like vintage computers, or more to the point – re-making them and playing with old tech. It can hardly be called nihilistic or pointless because I do this for enjoyment. Your assessment of vintage computer enthusiasts however …

    1. Of course the prize winners have been chosen. The federal government has decided the winners of every competition in history thanks to their collaboration with reptoid aliens who can see the future.

      #resistanceIsFutile

      1. Homer: “Well, now that you’re a little bit older, I can tell you that’s a crock! No matter how good you are at something there’s always about a million people better than you.”

        Bart: “Gotcha. Can’t win, don’t try.”

        (it seems there’s a simpson’s quote for every occasion in life) ;)

    2. Even if what you say is true, there is nothing stopping you from just creating a project for the fun of it.

      Arguably though it’s possible the fate of us all has already been decided and there is nothing we can do to change that.

      Why not just live in the moment, get your multimeter probes out and contribute to your role in the great play.

  2. That whole price thing is getting out of bound. I have no idea how many price-campaigns are currently running at the same time and every fifth post is about someone either winning a price or you came up with a new price sheme for people to enter. And now you even need new ideas how you could give out prices? Free stuff is cool, no way around it, but I feel like I’m on a Carneval here.

    1. Seconded, in full, with typos corrected :P

      But seriously, I’m tired of it too. It’s kind of depressing to me, actually — I have just barely enough money coming in to keep my ass out of debtor’s prison. I might be able to enter if someone wants to pay my mortgage for me until the competition’s over. (I really don’t think so!) Otherwise, I get to watch basically the rich crowd (hey, everything’s relative, if you can afford Burger King without coupons you’re doing better than me) have a lot of fun while I’m just trying to survive over here.

      Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that it’s great fun for the participants, and I’m also sure that /something/ good will come of it. But the way it works, it’s effectively locked out the poor folks unless you’re absolutely an undiscovered Einstein level genius (someone along the lines of the Malawi Windmill Kid, at least). Anything I can actually afford to do is not going to dazzle one damn soul. Heck, it probably won’t even dazzle /me/…

      Don’t get me wrong, I’ve an idea or two. But don’t expect me to enter until I can afford to do it right. That’s going to be a long, long time indeed… and in the mean time, I’d appreciate it if you folks could give it a little bit of a rest. It just pisses me off…

      1. I have been buying parts, but I haven’t spent over £50 on 4 entries and I am almost starting from scratch on parts, so I was really just filling my parts bin. I have been lucky enough to have won 2 prizes so far to help me on my way, the PCBs and the Bean which are worth as much as I have spent. I set my goal to only make projects that could be afforded in the third world. There is a great entry using a TV from a dumpster to make a sun powered ‘laser’ cutter. HaD still has all the usual great hacks, even more in fact with all the prize entries. Last year I sat on the sidelines and I am regreting it now.

        1. You’re more resourceful than I am, then — and I’ve a house full of crap that anyone sane would consider useless. (Most of it’s still useless, even to me — I’m just half nuts :P )

          Also, I’m in the US. Our money is worth (very very roughly) about half what yours is… and I’ve got a pittance of it at that. No, really, I’ve had to explain to people that the monetary equivalent of a Starbucks Latte (coffee with milk should not be 3USD /anywhere/ in the world, but that’s beside the point) is genuinely outside my reach most of the time.

          To be excruciatingly detailed…
          My mother and I live on roughly 1700USD per month. She’s disabled, so that’s how it comes in. (I’ll be rounding here. Deal with it.)
          Mortgage, 540USD a month.
          Two credit cards, each 100USD.
          Electric bill is complicated, but it averages out to about 200USD.
          We’re on a well system, so no water bill (but it factors into the electric bill, because it’s not a hand-pump, either; there aren’t /quite/ enough banjo players around for that :P ).
          Mobile phones, 110USD total for two of them, on an old plan that we can’t do any better than.
          Internet, 70USD because it’s an old mobile style setup (4g, amazingly enough, and an old unlimited plan). Verizon can suck my you-know-what for being the only option available to us and yet somehow the worst possible service imaginable outside of dialup. (Even the DSL lines don’t get to us — they used to, nobody signed up, and then the company actually rolled back its coverage. Bastards.)
          Car insurance 80USD.
          I get 50USD disposable income per month. An ‘allowance’ if you will — alas, it never seems to go as far as it should. I have 20USD of it free right now.

          The rest of the money is for groceries and we still have to use credit for that after about the 15th or 20th of the month. Food prices are crazy here. There’s a thing called “COLA” (Cost Of Living Adjustment) that means we get a little more each year. Guess what? The nutters who control it say that food and fuel prices went down and gave us a 1.8% COLA at the end of last year. I want to know where they’re shopping because it sure as hell isn’t anywhere I’ve been. Food is going UP. Fast. Fuel doesn’t really affect us — Mom can’t really drive. I don’t blame her for wanting to keep the car, but she can’t really use it and we both know it.

          Like I said, basically just trying to survive. Ugh.

          Did you know that the USA is the only developed nation in the world with NO decent social safety net? (Subject to some debate, if only because there are some in willful denial and some who are badly, badly misinformed by the deniers.)

          1. I too am grasping for funds. Trying to “win” some new stuff is my only shot at teching up my project a bit to survive even to the semi-finals. Too many well versed and well conceived projects coming in to really survive to the end of this thing, but I am going to try. The alternative is to do nothing, and screw around with what I scrounge up with no meaningful purpose other than amusement…..And I can do that anytime. Right now I am sorta dead in the water, and next weeks prize does not fit into my project whatsoever…..So for now….I am a watcher. But always thinking.

          2. This was me about a year ago. Things aren’t much better now, but I have a couple hundred dollars of disposable income per month now. My first Arduino Nano (Chinese clone actually), I had to collect cans off the side of the road to have the cash for. I reappropriated food from work so I could eat on my days off. Cars? Ha, I had a motorcycle and that was my only form of transportation. Have you ever ridden a motorcycle when it is twenty degrees outside? It sucks. I sold just about everything I owned just to break even every month and then started over again when rent was paid. Things are better now, but I still have to wait for a lot of the cool things I want. My splurge this month was a Pi 2. I understand what you mean by wanting to do it right, but you could still post an idea. Some of my projects are cellphone pics of my hand drawn sketches with a rough outline of what I intend to accomplish. I can’t do a fancy 3D model to save my life. If it wasn’t for winning the prize for board manufacture, I wouldn’t have been able to do it, although I would have figured out something. Lemme help you out: Message me on the projects site (profile linked in my name), and I’ll send you some of my spare parts. I have a few of those Arduino Nano clones kicking around, plus all kinds of random spare parts. I know it’s not gonna help you pay the bills, but it might help you develop your skills and maybe get an idea up and running for the Prize!

          3. Replying to Mr Never Actually President over there — I’m out of school. Did my time, all the way through a four-year college. (My last year of college was when Mom became disabled and we got poor.) Graduated May 2009.

            I am indeed unemployed. There are no decent jobs in my town. None. Again, we can’t move. Don’t want to give up the house, don’t have the money to go anywhere else anyways.

            Believe me, I would like to have a decent job. There aren’t any. I’m not a mop floors kinda guy — there are things I cannot do, and I know and understand that (I can only speak for myself here).

            Did you know that, out of every US dollar spent in the economy, ninety-five cents goes to the 1%, and the rest of us get to split the nickel? The supposed end of the recession only actually happened for the rich. Rest of us are still in it, whether or not we want to admit it.

      2. Right now these door prizes do not need real hardware/software yet. All you need to do is to come up with an idea and show how it’ll do something to make this a better world. So it would take some time and efforts, but no money needed to have a chance to win.

        It is not always about buying something new to build stuff. If you are poor, you really should take a look at what hacks you have (or can be) done that make/made you life a bit better. There are lots of poor people around that might benefit from that too.

    2. I agree somewhat with starhalk.

      Please don’t take this as a complaint as it is not. These comps don’t appeal to me so I don’t enter – simple as that.

      But for my ‘2 cents worth’ – these comps seem horribly unbalanced and don’t come near what I would call a ‘true hacker spirit’.

      I true hacker will be squeezing the last MIPs out of his 8 Micro by getting down to bare metal code while others simply throw more MIPs at the project with an upgraded 32 Bit Micro.

      The true hackers entry will be lost and forgotten in amongst the wow factor generated by those who have more money to play with.

      These comps (in my opinion) seriously need some sort grading system and the total cost of BOM would be just that for two reasons –
      1) It’s inclusive for the range of disposable incomes that all here would have.
      2) True hackers CAN do things on a budget.

      As for prizes – well who should complain about free stuff. BUT – ask yourself – are people are doing things for the prizes or are they doing something they want to do and are the prize is just a bonus on top of that. I you have specified the goal then it’s not likely that are doing it because that is what they wanted to do.

      You could introduce many simple and inexpensive comp that would be ‘community building’ with the cheapest of prizes or even no (hardware) prize at all.

      Rough examples –
      Do ‘some specific thing’ complex but inexpensive with just TTL chips –
      Do ‘some specific thing’ FAST (ie bare metal code) with a low MIPs micro.
      Make something that does ‘x’ out of passives.

      Or even more ‘free range’. Specifying the goal or objective is really narrowing down the number of entrants. Leaving the goal more ‘open’ is going to attract more entrants.

      Rough examples –
      Do ‘anything’ complex but inexpensive with just TTL chips –
      Do ‘anything’ FAST (ie bare metal code) with a low MIPs micro.
      Make something that does ‘anything’ out of passives.

      1. Well thought out :) I like what you say.

        I’d like to see the thing structured so that it wasn’t nearly so subjective, myself. A project really has to dazzle to have a chance. I can’t 3d model. I don’t have a CNC machine. C code hates me (I can do BASIC a little, and that’s about it — hey, I’m a hardware guy, what can I say). I have pencil, paper, a couple drills (one of which I actually more-or-less built from parts — well, okay, the motor/gearbox/chuck came from an expired drill, but the rest is mine) and hand tools — and not a whole hell of a lot else. My soldering iron was a Christmas present. It’s dying now (it wasn’t as good a model as I thought) and I have literally no good idea how I can get us$35 to replace it with something even vaguely decent. My money is spent.

        If poor folk like me had a chance… I’d be all over this thing. I know better, tho. It just ain’t happenin’.

        1. in 2015/05/05/open-source-diy-soldering-robot/ (4 pages back from this)
          rasz_pl says: May 5, 2015 at 3:07 pm
          why bother when you can buy similar experience for $22

          http://www.ebay.com/itm/Digital-Soldering-Iron-Station-Temperature-Controller-Kits-for-HAKKO-T12-Handle-/171740295563

          This is DIY digital controller for Hakko T12 tips (and chinese clones), Chinese tips are practically identical to genuine (tested by people building diy controllers on dangerousprototypes forum)

          1. Wow, that has some real promise.

            My current iron is an ATTEN 937b rebranded by Sparkfun. My father got it for me in IIRC 2013 for Christmas. I was looking to upgrade to the 937D+ which is ~$35 on eBay. The 937b I have takes the 900M series tips… looks like they’re “compatible enough” to probably work with the kit you posted, which is great because I have a couple of them (literally — the one that came with the replacement wand (original wand’s thermistor went bad, just out of warranty) and a ‘hot knife’ tip that was a little expensive IMO).

            Also, looks like it requires a 12-24v DC power supply. I’ve got an old Dell PA-6 Series laptop brick that I can probably adapt… 20v 3.5a should be enough to run this thing :) might even be able to adapt the current iron’s housing for this new kit, that would be cool.

            Thanks, tekkie, that’s going in my bookmarks for when I have a little money again.

      2. By your definition hackers are all perfectionists that count clock cycles in assembly. Sorry but sometimes just making something work in a way it wasn’t intended is good enough to be a hack and therefor the creator is a hacker. We can’t all be a sprite_tm!

      3. I agree that the competition should be about true hacking rather than making a product. But the organisers this year have added a new category to the competition to accommodate these entries (best product), as there was a lot of controversy last year surrounding that.

        As to whether they stick to their guns this year remains to be seen, but it does seem like they are trying their best to benefit the community this time around.

        In the end we shouldn’t really be worried about the competition itself, we should be glad that there is something out there that is generating interest in the hacking scene that shows it in a positive light.

        The competition should be just to spark interest and the rest is up to you to take your project to the nth degree to make it successful in more ways than just winning a competition.

      4. Product engineering is as much a hack as anything else. Making a design that works for thousands is much harder than hacking together a one-offs that works. You have to work around the limitations of the parts and manufacturing process and getting away with margins for it to work. It is about team work with your supply chain, your contract manufacturers, scheduling, finances and marketing.

        At the end of the day, the sponsers are suppliers and supply chain. They’ll need to get something out of this too. So their marketing guys report to the boss. Their real target markets are people that design and build productions. A dozen of design win for their products is much better than just 500 chips used in the contest.

    1. It’s hard to learn anything without trying. Now you at least have a better understanding of what you don’t know, and at best realize it isnt all that hard to document a project you are thinking of building. Good for you!

  3. Cool beans this is exactly the sort of little USB controller I was looking for to make a custom game controller. Seems like there are already some loose guides on how to go about exactly that. So looks like I’m ordering another thing :P

  4. Haven’t won anything in a very long time so I was pleasantly surprised to see that I’d won a LightBlue Bean just now! :D
    I have some cool ideas on how to use it and I find myself to be more creative by using something I haven’t planned or just stumbled across so this was perfect for me!

    I for one applauds Hackaday for have a lot of prize give-aways since it helps creativity flow :)

  5. Just commenting, to say thank you to Hackaday for choosing my project (HydroPWNics) as a winner! I’m a longtime reader and its good to win something in one of these contests. I’ll be sure to do something cool and post about it!!!!

  6. ”Scientists investigate that which already is; engineers create that which has never been.” — Albert Einstein

    ”Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known” – Carl Sagan

    ”Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better” – Edsger W. Dijkstra

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