This week, we announced the winners for the previous Pet Hacks contest and rang in our new contest: The One Hertz Challenge. So that’s got me in a contesty mood, and I thought I’d share a little bit of soap-box philosophizing and inside baseball all at once.
The trick to creating a good contest theme, at least for the creative Hackaday crowd, is putting on the right limitation. Maybe you have to fit the circuit within a square-inch, power it only with a coin cell, or use the antiquated and nearly useless 555 timer IC. (Yes, that was a joke!)
There are two basic reactions when you try to constrain a hacker. Some instantly try to break out of the constraint, and their minds starts to fly in all of the directions that lead out of the box, and oftentimes, something cool comes out of it. The other type accepts the constraint and dives in deep to work within it, meditating deeply on all the possibilities that lie within the 555.
Of course, we try to accommodate both modes, and the jury is still out as to which ends up better in the end. For the Coin Cell challenge, for instance, we had a coin-cell-powered spot welder and car jumpstarter, but we also had some cool circuits that would run nearly forever on a single battery; working against and with the constraints.
Which type of hacker are you? (And while we’re still in the mood, what contest themes would you like to see for 2026?)
Back in the day, Elektor magazine ran a “can challenge” where you had to design a project that fitted into a standard soda can (probably 330ml, being European). Some of the published designs were extremely creative.
Various 10 or 5 liners contests(BASIC) ;)
Oh yeah! We did a 1k challenge a while back. Heavily favored 8-bit instruction sets…
(1)We have had “one square inch”, how about “one cubic inch” better “one cubic inch self-contained” ; variation: stows to OCI, but deployable… (2) All-homebrew… the supply chain has died, what can you do with what you can get locally ( a post-collapse version of covid/2020 “making tech at home” hackaday contest… (3) Old-timey / alternate tech: the Bell network once used “handset tech” (basicly earpiece transducer coupled to a carbon mic capsuel) to amplify long-distance analog voice signals… what could you do with a (home-made) magnetic amplifier (bonus for making your own rectifiers)… SiC leds, Lilienfeld FETs (4) thinking -about- the box: innovative enclosure/packaging hacks -elegant front-panels! (5) DIY sensors ’nuff said! (6) Motors and actuators -cheap? powerful? precise? -a moving experience! (7) Cheap! show what can be done for say USD$5 (purchaseable BOM required) . (7) Kitchen tech (camera + AI for perfect French toast? BurgerMeter (what ever that may be)? (8) 007… (Spy-tech) (non-lethal, please). (9) techno-magery: -Mystify us… (10) trek-tech: build a working “tricorder” how much science can you stuff inside a convenient shoulderbag/box? (11) Enviromental Power-harvesting: no chargers required… (12) Commercial-killers: Make media-watching more pleasant/tolerable. (12) stealth/alternative communications -meshnet is just the beginning! (12) garden tech: weed-free without poison! all the water your plants need, but none wasted… Racoons are cool! but not in my garden… keep them out of the crops. (13) hardware fabrication tools and techniques: sucessor to the stick-vise, DIY smart soldering iron, DIY pcb tech (14) “mars rovers” for planet earth, DIY, of course
I’d go with (2) and (11), but I won’t finish the documentation on time :(
(it is a on/off project with lots of rabbit holes, more than 25 years old, and I gave up on trying to finish next year several years ago)
I vote for either a test equipment or RF (amateur radio?) contest