It’s back! The 555 timer contest wants to see you do something cool with the 555 timer chip. At stake is the adulation of electronics geeks everywhere. Three top winners will be awarded a $150 shopping spree in the Digi-Key warehouse thanks to Digi-Key’s generous sponsorship of this contest.
FlowIO Platform, a modular pneumatics controller for soft robotics and smart material projects, took home Grand Prize honors at the 2021 Hackaday Prize. Aside from the prestige of coming out on top of hundreds of projects and bragging rights for winning the biggest hardware design challenge on Earth, the prize carries an award of $25,000 and a Supplyframe DesignLab residency to continue project development. Four other top winners were also announced at the Hackaday Remoticon virtual conference on Saturday evening.
In a year full of challenges, this year’s Hackaday Prize laid down yet another gauntlet: to “Rethink, Refresh, and Rebuild.” We asked everyone to take a good hard look at the systems and processes that make the world work — or in some cases, not work — and reimagine them from a fresh perspective. Are there better ways to do things? What would you come up with if you started from a blank piece of paper? How can you support and engage the next generation of engineers, and inspire them to take up the torch? And what would you come up with if you just let your imagination run wild?
And boy, did you deliver! With almost 500 entries, this year’s judges had quite a task in front of them. Each of the five challenges — Refresh Displays, Rethink Work-From-Home Life, Reimagine Supportive Tech, Redefine Robots, and Reactivate Wildcard — had ten finalists, which formed the pool of entries for the overall prize. And here’s what they came up with.
Continue reading “FlowIO Takes Top Honors In The 2021 Hackaday Prize”
Hackaday conferences have a long history of excellent T-shirt designs and this year’s Remoticon is no different. If you want one of your own, you need get on that before Friday. The only way to score on is to buy one of the T-Shirt + General Admission tickets by November 11th — it gets you into all of the conference events just like the free ticket, but also scores you a shirt. (Shipping within the US is free, international delivery costs an additional $10.) What you see above is the actual test print, modeled by Aleksandar Bradic who designed this and all of the shirt from past Hackaday conferences.
Of course the most important thing is that you don’t miss Remoticon, and there is a free ticket which will remain available through the end of the conference, but you can help us with the logistics by getting one now.
The full list of speakers and the schedule is now available on the conference website. We’re delighted to have Elecia White, Keith Thorne, and Jeremy Fielding present keynote talks, and 16 additional speakers on a range of hardware-related topics. (This is notable: we originally planned for a single day of talks but were blow away by all the proposals and doubled the speaking slots!)
You can’t quite rub elbows with all your friends from afar, but you can certainly spend time together in the conference Discord, during the Hacker Trivia (form teams if you like!), at the Bring-a-Hack inside Gather Town, and at the afterparty which will include a live set from DJ Jackalope.
If you bought a shirt and have already claimed it using the code we emailed to you, thank you, you are all set.
If you already bought a shirt but haven’t claimed it, check your email. You need to respond to the Google form we sent you. If you bought a T-shirt ticket and didn’t get an email from us, let us know. All shirts need to be claimed by November 15th! Gogogo!
If you plan to order your shirt right now, here’s what will happen. Buy your ticket following the link at the top of this article. We will email you a poll question about domestic or international shipping because we have to use two different ordering interfaces for these — logistics are hard. We will then email you a redemption code and link where you can choose your size and shipping address.
Thank you to everyone for your amazing patience through this process. We wanted to replicate the experience of walking into Supercon and getting a shirt at the check-in table. Shipping logistics made that a bit harder, but everyone involved has been super awesome about it and that feels really good. See you at Remoticon a week from Friday!
It was a tight race, but the results of the Halloween Hackfest contest are in. We asked you to scare up a terrifying build in one of three categories, and as usual, you didn’t disappoint! These three hackers have each won a $150 shopping spree at Digi-Key to fund their future frights.
Nelson Bairos
[Nelson] has been in the Halloween-based animatronics business for more than a decade, but always gets beaten to the punch when it comes to doing the really fun stuff like making things move and speak. Once [Nelson] got their hands on a 12-foot skeleton from the big box hardware store, it was time for the gloves to come off and the fun to begin.
The three axes of movement come from a rotation servo, a tilt servo, and a nod servo, all of which are connected to each other and the skeleton with 3D-printed supports. Lucky for us, [Nelson] documented this first build quite nicely and provided the 3D models, should you suddenly get the urge to go see if they have any of these magnificent skeletons left on clearance.
Glen Atkins
What’s scarier than the undead? How about people who were buried alive, whether accidentally or not. Can you imagine hanging around in a graveyard, innocently doing tombstone rubbings or some ritualistic sacrifice when suddenly you hear someone ringing a bell and/or a terrified, muddled voice screaming for help?
[Glen Atkins]’ Safety Coffin Grave Bell build forgoes the body part, but in the dark, it’s easy to let your imagination run wild. It looks like a bell on a post, but pass too close and the ultrasonic rangefinder detects unsuspecting trick-or-treaters and gives them a scare by frantically ringing the bell with a big servo hidden inside. We hope they brought spare underwear.
Skye Rutan-bedard
[Skye] won a lot of people over last year with their computer head costume that featured a lone blinking eye and a voice. What those people didn’t know was that it suffered from three big problems: it had poor ergonomics from a heavy monitor shell, the blinkenlights matrix used to display emotions was underutilized, and using a keyboard proved to be an inconvenient UI for running the voice. This year, [Skye] set out to fix all the problems and make the costume even more awesome and comfortable to wear.
The brain of this computer head costume is a Raspberry Pi 4. As for [Skye]’s actual head, it is safely enclosed inside a hard hat that’s epoxied to the inside of the case. A wide range of emotions dance across the 16×16 RGB LED matrix that looks great behind some mirrored film, and they go great with the new voice method — [Skye] speaks softly into a small microphone, and the Raspi uses Mozilla’s DeepSpeech to repeat whatever they say in a robotic British accent.
Congratulations to all the winners, and a big thank you to all 45 entrants for your hair-raising hacks. Thank you also to Adafruit and Digi-Key for sponsoring this contest. We hope you had a great Halloween!
Each phase of the 2021 Hackaday Prize challenged designers to reimagine traditional solutions within various fields, from robotics to assistive devices. But for the Reactivate Wildcard, the fifth and final Challenge of this year’s Prize, this theme of Rethink, Refresh, Rebuild could be applied on anything the entrant wanted. Today we’re pleased to announce the ten Wildcard projects that have been selected to win $500 and move onto the finals. Who will win the top spot this year? We’ll find out during Hackaday Remoticon in just a few weeks!
The MetaSense project is a perfect example of how new technology can be used to rethink what we generally consider to be a solved problem. This project leverages multi-material 3D printing to produce conductive cells which vary their capacitance in response to physical deformation. With some clever geometry, these cells can be chained together to produce single-part devices which can stand in for traditional toggle switches, joysticks, pressure sensors, and even accelerometers.
Speaking of 3D printing, the Direct Granules Extruder project imagines a future were desktop printers are no longer limited to using rolls of manufactured filament. The key is a robust extruder design that can grind up plastic pellets fast enough to feed them directly into the hotend of a conventional 3D printer. This not only means a considerable operational savings, as raw plastic pellets are much cheaper than filament by weight, but would potentially allow for printing with more exotic plastic blends and even recycled materials.
Some of the projects even made us rethink what’s possible for the individual hacker. The WiFiWart utilizes a miniature single-board Linux computer that was designed and built from the ground up by a single person, using only free and open source software. Whether it’s that this penetration testing gadget has packed a full Linux computer and two WiFi adapters into a box the size of a phone charger, or the fact that it’s been done by a dedicated hacker with free tools, you can’t help but come away impressed with this one.
With nearly 100 projects submitted for the Reactivate Wildcard challenge, this was clearly a theme that resonated with the Hackaday community. As always, it was extremely difficult to narrow this down to the ten finalists below:
Whether or not they made the Finals this year, the complete list of Reactivate Wildcard entries contains an incredible array of fascinating concepts that are well worth browsing through. If any of them particularly catch your eye, why not strike up a conversation with the creator in the comments and see if you can’t help out? There’s always next year.
Oh, walnuts! How can we already be at the end of the last round? 2021 has been a time warp and now we are staring down the final day to enter the Reactivate Wildcard challenge of the Hackaday Prize. You must enter by 7 AM Pacific time on Wednesday or it’s too late!
Of course the good news is that the topic is wide-open. Wildcard is for all the things that didn’t fit in the first four entry challenges. If it’s a good idea, if it’s a build that really matters, it should be entered!
The ten winning projects from this round will each get $500 cash prizes, and be shuttled on to the final round. All 50 finalists will have until November 7th to hone their offerings, at which point our slate of expert judges will pick the most interesting and impactful for the $25,000 grand prize and four other top prizes.
And how, you ask, will you find out who won? The Hackaday Prize Ceremony will be held online on November 20th during the Hackaday Remoticion. So your assignment today is to warm up that keyboard, mouse, and smartphone camera to get your project entered right away! Step two is to grab your ticket to Remoticon for a weekend of wonderful talks, great people, and an inspiring lineup of hardware builds that made this year’s Hackaday Prize truly shine.
Wondering what kind of stuff makes a great Wildcard entry? Majenta Strongheart has you covered in her latest video roundup below.
Continue reading “This Really Really Is Your Last Chance To Enter The 2021 Hackaday Prize (Really!)”
The final entry round of the Hackaday Prize begins today, and the theme is… anything! While we’ve guided you through work-from-home, robots, displays, and supportive devices, there are countless great ideas that don’t fit in those boxes. So for this round, just show us what you got!
Entering the Reactive Wildcard round is easy. Publish a page about your project over on Hackaday.io and use the left sidebar “Submit-to” menu on that page to add it to the Hackaday prize. The point is to build a better future, and we can’t wait to see what you think that looks like. Need some inspiration? Check out the four challenge update videos below to see what others have been entering so far this year.
What’s at stake here? Ten entries in this round will each receive a cash prize of $500 and move onto the final round. There, they content with finalist from the other four rounds for the $25,000 Grand Prize, and four other top prizes. There is also the geek cred of making the finals, a priceless achievement, even if we do say so ourselves.
Continue reading “It’s Wildcard Time, Your Last Chance To Enter The Hackaday Prize!”
