The Hackaday Prize

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2015 Hackaday Prize: Build Something That Matters

March 10, 2015 by 86 Comments

Last year we challenged you to build the next generation of connected devices. Six months later, the best teams and projects from around the world battled for the greatest prize of all: the respect of their peers and a trip to space. This year, we’re issuing a call to hackers, engineers, makers and startups from all over the world, to focus their creative efforts on nothing less than solving serious issues facing humanity.

Fix the World

thp2015-build-something-that-matters-a6We’ll all be facing a lot of problems in the next few decades, whether they’re from rising costs and consumption of oil, droughts, access to food, demographic shifts in populations, or increasing health care costs. These problems need to be dealt with, and there’s no better time than right now to start working on solutions.

What do we want from you? We want you to identify the greatest problems faced by humanity in the next few years and come up with a solution. This can be anything from better, lower-cost solar power components, inexpensive ultrasound machines, better ways to store drugs, more advanced ways of measuring farm production, or cheaper, more sustainable smartphones to bridge the digital divide. The world is full of problems, but if there’s one thing hackers have taught us, it’s that there are more than enough people willing to find solutions.

Prizes

If worldwide notoriety isn’t enough personal incentive, Hackaday is back with a huge slate of prizes for those devices that best exemplify solutions to problems that matter.

The Grand Prize is a trip to space on a carrier of your choice or $196,883 (a Monster Group number). Other top prizes include a 90-Watt laser cutter, a builder kit (pcb mill, 3d printer, cnc router, bench lathe), a tour of CERN in Geneva, and a tour of Shenzhen in China.

New this year is the Best Product award. Go the extra mile and show a production-ready device (in addition to supplying three beta test units for judging) and you can score $100,000! The entry is of course still eligible to compete for the Grand prize and other top prizes.

We’re able to pull this off once again thanks to the vision of Supplyframe who managed to unite giants of the electronics industry as sponsors of the 2015 Hackaday Prize. Atmel, Freescale, Microchip, Mouser, and Texas Instruments have all signed on in supporting this mission.

Individuals, Colleges, Hackerspaces, and Startups

If you just don’t want to go-it alone, get your team excited. After all, it was a team that won the Grand Prize last year. SatNOGS transformed the cash-option of $196,418 into a jumpstart for a foundation to carry the project forward. Get the boss on board by touting the notoriety your company will get from showing off their engineering prowess. Or help build your resume by herding your college buddies into some brainstorming session. And the Best Product prize is perfect for Startups who want to show off their builds.

Judges

Joining the Judging Panels this year are Akiba (Freaklabs), Pete Dokter (Sparkfun), Heather Knight (Marilyn MonRobot), Ben Krasnow (GoogleX & host of Applied Science on YouTube), Lenore Edman & Windell Oskay (Evil Mad Scientist Labs), and Micah Scott (Scanlime).

Our returning judges are Limor “Ladyada” Fried (Adafruit), Jack Ganssle (Ganssle Group, & The Embedded Muse), Dave Jones (EEVBlog), Ian Lesnet (Dangerous Prototypes), and Elecia White (Logical Elegance).

You can read all of the judge bios and find social media and webpage links for them on our Judges page. We are indebted to these industry experts for sharing their time and talent to make the Hackaday Prize possible.

Tell Everyone

We don’t ask often: please tell everyone you know about the 2015 Hackaday Prize! Social media share icons are just above the image at the top of this post. Submit this page or the prize page (http://hackaday.io/prize) to all your favorite sites. No hacker should get through this day without hearing about #HackadayPrize and we can’t reach total media saturation without your help. Thanks in advance!

GET STARTED NOW

Don’t wait, put up an idea right now and tag it with “2015HackadayPrize”. We’re sending out swag for early ideas that help get the ball rolling. And as you flesh out your plans you could score prizes to help build the prototype like PCBs, 3D prints, laser cutting, etc. Make it to the finals and you’ll be looking at the five top prizes we mentioned earlier. A simple idea can change the world.

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Hackaday Meetup At SXSW

March 6, 2015 by 2 Comments

Each year the giant South by Southwest (SXSW) festival descends on Austin, Texas. It attracts droves of music lovers, among them an ocean of our kind of tech geeks. This year the crowd will trend evermore in that direction since Hackaday has decided to be there too!

In addition to scouring the crowd for awesome tech, we have a booth and are hosting an organized Hackaday meetup on Friday 3/13 at 11:00am. It’s free to all so put it on your calendar now! Several of our Hackaday crew will be there, we’re bringing cool hardware, and of course we’ll have some swag in tow the most hardcore of hackers.

This is one chance to talk about our passion: hardware development. We’ll be discussing the concept of focused and sustained efforts at building hardware as individuals, small teams, and a growing community. We know this is possible… we saw a lot of it with The Hackaday Prize and had a great look at one type of distributed development process through Developed on Hackaday which followed the Mooltipass project. Of course it’s not a lecture so bring your own ideas while we all chew the fat of what the future needs to look like.

As we mentioned, we have a booth at SXSW Create. Entry is again free to all and runs 11am-6pm for three days — find us in one of the four corner stalls. There we will be exhibiting the hardware from SatNOGS, ChipWhisperer, PortableSDR, Open Science Tricorder, and RamanPi. Don’t know what’s notable about these projects? They all won big for sharing the details of their future tech designs.

So, find us there! Give a shout on Twitter if you wonder what’s going on (we’re always looking for a good impromptu beer meetup or taco crawl). @hackaday, @hackadayio, @hackadayprize

Ground Stations Are Just The Beginning: The SatNOGS Story

February 19, 2015 by 26 Comments

When you think of satellites, you may think of the Space Shuttle extending its robot arm with a huge piece of high-tech equipment waiting to pirouette into orbit. This misconception is similar to picturing huge mainframes when thinking about computers. The future (and arguably even the present) reality of satellites is smaller, cheaper, and more prolific. This future is also an “open” one if the Libre Space Foundation has anything to say about it.

This group that plans to make satellite communications available to anyone started out as a build at a hackerspace. One good idea, a shared set of skills and experience, and a little bit of time led them to accomplish amazing things. We are, of course, talking about the Grand Prize winners of the 2014 Hackaday Prize. The SatNOGS team built a working satellite ground station and laid the foundation for a data-sharing network to connect to it. But even this description can be a bit daunting, so come with me to learn what this is all about, and how it matters to you.

Continue reading “Ground Stations Are Just The Beginning: The SatNOGS Story” →

PortableSDR Makes It To Kickstarter

January 14, 2015 by 22 Comments

Last year’s Hackaday Prize saw a lot of projects that were crying out to be Kickstarter Campaigns, but non has seen people throwing money at their screens quite like [Michael]’s PortableSDR. It’s a small, handheld, battery-powered shortwave software defined transceiver that can do just about everything with coverage up to 30MHz. It’s the ultimate apocalypse radio, a contender for to the throne now held by the ‘my first radio’ Baofeng, and now, finally, a campaign on Kickstarter.

The PortableSDR (now called the PSDR) started off as [Michael]’s ideal radio. It just so happened the Hackaday Prize gave him the impetus design, develop, and build the radio that would eventually land him third place in The Hackaday Prize.

The radio itself is completely self-contained and battery-powered, implementing a software defined radio on an STM32F4 processor. The design includes an LCD for the waterfall display, vector network analysis, and the ability to receive GPS.

In keeping with its ham heritage, [Michael] is offering the PSDR as a kit, with a PCB, enclosure, and all the parts you can’t get on Digikey available for a $250 pledge. Get those toaster reflow ovens warm, because there’s a lot of SMD parts in this build.

Continue reading “PortableSDR Makes It To Kickstarter” →

[Sophi Kravitz] Joins The Hackaday Crew

December 30, 2014 by 32 Comments

Please join us in welcoming [Sophi Kravitz] to the Hackaday crew. She is coming on board to crank on the 2015 Hackaday Prize. You may remember a post from a few weeks ago when we were in search of a person with a skill set that could only be described as mythical. [Sophi] jumped at the chance and it is immediately clear that she belongs here.

[Sophi] walks the walk, and talks the talk. She’s an EE and has worked with art installations, built props and FX for movies, and tackled jobs that some might consider ‘more serious’ engineering challenges. Her passion for electronics has led her to evangelize education on the subject by working with student programs, and she recently served as a Hacker in Residence with Sparkfun. Her love of the hardware community already has her promoting hacking by immersing herself in Hackerspace culture and organizing events like the Bring a Hack meetup at Maker Faire New York.

We have big plans for the 2015 Hackaday Prize which will be announced soon. In the meantime, anyone attending the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next week can meet up with [Sophi] and find out about the plans we’ve made so far. She will be at CES to represent Hackaday along with [Mike Szczys] and [Sarah Petkus]. We’re planning an impromptu meetup for anyone interested. Reply to this Tweet to tell us you’ll be there and we’ll make sure to get you the details when we have them. And of course, if you want to get your hands on some Hackaday stickers track us down during the conference. Check out our CES Twitter list to make more connections.

$50k In Components Hit The Hands Of Hackaday Prize Semifinalists

December 22, 2014 by 12 Comments

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.

Surviving The Hackaday Prize Party

November 14, 2014 by 19 Comments

What a week it has been. I’m in Munich, Germany along with [Brian], [Jasmine], [Ben], [Alek], and the rest of the crew who helped plan and guide the 2014 Hackaday Prize. If you somehow missed it, we announce the rank order of the finalists. It was SatNOGS that claimed the Grand Prize, congratulations!

We have a ton of content headed your way, but to be honest there’s going to be a bit of “recovery lag” before that hits the front page. We spent the entire day at Technikum in the Munich Kalturfabrik. It was originally some sort of factory complex (having to do with potato processing) which has since been turned into co-working spaces, restaurants, and performing arts venues. We felt right at home in the post-industrial, brightly muraled maze of buildings.

The official activities started with the Embedded Hardware Workshops which were packed! The previously assured “robust” WiFi immediately, and repeatedly, went down. Fortunately hackers being hackers everyone pooled their local copies onto one SD card and passed it around. We’ve segregated that piece of hardware in an evidence bag for future testing.

We pushed back the closing of the workshops by about 40 minutes since everyone was having fun. This marginally outraged the company who was handling furniture and food as we weren’t following the plan. They were pleasant enough about the issue but for me it was an interesting peek at the difference in cultures. During the switch we had lightning talks which I found both enthusiastic and interesting. We then moved to the major presentations of the night. [Jeroen Domburg] aka [Sprite_TM] gave a stunning presentation about reverse engineering the ridiculously overpowered microcontroller on a special lighted keyboard. We’ll surely have a standalone post about it. We then closed with a recap of The Hackaday Prize and the naming of the winners. That too will have its own feature.

DSC_0095After handing over the trophy, and taking a few photos the writers all rushed to the downstairs “backstage” area. I had previously written the announcement post and we spent some time getting the word out, first to all the finalists, then to the sites that are close friends, and finally started pushing the news on social media. All work and no play? Forget about it. The party was raging and the food and drinks were fantastic. They were, however, far outshined by the conversations with interesting people to be found at every turn. I spoke with people who had driven in just for the event from France, Austria, and of course all over Germany.

The venue was packed up starting around Midnight. You know it’s a great time when the crowd hangs out in the cold for another 40 minutes afterward. The point of the story? Any chance you have to spend time with the great people who make up the Hackaday community is a chance to jump at. Where to next?