The Incredible Judges Of The Hackaday Prize

October 29, 2018 by Brian Benchoff No comments

The time to enter The Hackaday Prize has ended, but that doesn’t mean we’re done with the world’s greatest hardware competition just yet. Over the past few months, we’ve gotten a sneak peek at over a thousand amazing projects, from Open Hardware to Human Computer Interfaces. This is a contest, though, and to decide the winner, we’re tapping some of the greats in the hardware world to judge these astonishing projects.

Below are just a preview of the judges in this year’s Hackaday Prize. They’ve been busy looking over all of the finalists and on Saturday we’ll announce the winners of the Hackaday Prize at the Hackaday Superconference in Pasadena. This is not an event to be missed — not only are we going to hear some fantastic technical talks from the hardware greats, but we’re also going to see who will walk away with the Grand Prize of $50,000.

Quinn Dunki

The mighty Quinn has been making games for 36 years on platforms ranging from the Apple II to all manner of newfangled things. She currently manages engineering for mobile games at Scopely, and pursues consulting, independent development, mixed-media engineering projects, and writing. Quinn is best known to the Hackaday crowd for Veronica, the 6502 system with everything and the kitchen sink on a backplane. It’s got PS/2, VGA, and Pong in ROM. The build log for Veronica has been an inspiration to many, and served as the basis for numerous homebrew systems. She continues to inspire with her blog, her YouTube Channel, and of course her Hackaday articles.

Eben Upton

In his earlier life, Eben founded two successful mobile game and middleware companies, but right now he’s most famous for founding the Raspberry Pi foundation and serving as the CEO of Raspberry Pi (Trading) LTD. Under his leadership, the Raspberry Pi has grown from some weird looking board with a USB port on one end, HDMI on the other, and a camera stuck in the middle. After months of work, hopes this computer might not be vaporware grew, and now the Raspberry Pi is the best-selling computer ever made (with apologies to the engineers behind the best selling home computer ever made).

Lauren McCarthy

Lauren McCarthy is an artist based in Los Angles and Brooklyn whose work explores systems for being a person and interacting with other people. She is an Assistant Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts, a Sundance Institute Fellow, and was previously a resident at CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Eyebeam, Autodesk, and more. Lauren’s work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as Ars Electronica, Fotomuseum Winterthur, SIGGRAPH, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA DocLab, and the Japan Media Arts Festival. She is the creator of p5.js, an open source platform for learning creative expression through code online.

Chris Anderson

From 2001 through 2012, Chris was the Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine, but now he’s the CEO of 3DR and founder of DIY Drones and DIY Robotcars. These Robocar races are held monthly-ish, and have so far proven an ideal platform to teach kids STEM, and have become something like the next generation of BattleBots, only with a few more computer vision algorithms and a few less RC transmitters. In addition to Robocars, Chris is one of the greatest advocates for flying drones, including those of the fixed-wing variety.

These are just a few of the amazingly accomplished judges we have lined up to determine the winner of this year’s Hackaday Prize. The winner will be announced on November 3rd at the Hackaday Superconference. If you can’t join us in person, don’t worry. We’re going to be live streaming everything, including the prize ceremony, where one team will walk away with the grand prize of $50,000. It’s not an event to miss.

The Incredible Judges Of The Hackaday Prize

October 22, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

Below are just a preview of the judges in this year’s Hackaday Prize. We’re sending the judging sheets out to them, tallying the results, and in less than two weeks we’ll announce the winners of the Hackaday Prize at the Hackaday Superconference in Pasadena. This is not an event to be missed — not only are we going to hear some fantastic technical talks from the hardware greats, but we’re also going to see who will walk away with the Grand Prize of $50,000.

Mitch Altman

Mitch’s early claim to fame is inventing the TV-B-Gone, a device that is so devious it got several Gizmodo reporters banned from CES for life. I suppose the idea was to punish those Gizmodo reporters, but as we all know being banned from CES is a blessing in disguise. Mitch has been published in Make Magazine, 2600, and is a mentor at the HAX accelerator. He is the co-founder of Noisebridge, the legendary San Francisco hackerspace, president and CEO of Cornfield Electronics, and makes his way around to various hacker gatherings where he’s always more than eager to teach people the ins and outs of electronics, soldering, and teaching cool things.

Chris from Clickspring

Clickspring, or Chris as he’s called by people IRL, has made his mark by being one of the best machinist channels on YouTube. Chris began making videos several years ago by recreating a brass clock in his home machine shop. Over the course of several months and millions of views on YouTube, Chris delved deep into the technology of making a clock out of brass stock using the most minimal machine tools. Currently, Chris is working on a multi-part video series where he’s constructing a replica of the Antikythera Mechanism using only technology that would have been available to a Greek engineer around the year 100 BC. This is, simply, one of the greatest feats of experimental archaeology, and it’s happening right now on Chris’ YouTube channel.

Kristin Paget

Kristin ‘Hacker Princess’ Paget is currently working at Lyft designing security systems for self-driving cars and futzing about with wireless security. For fun, she builds IMSI catchers and RFID cloners, and has given talks at the Hackaday Superconference about the laws of IoT Security and at Shmoocon about how terrible contactless credit cards actually are. When it comes to wireless security, Kristin is who you want to talk to, and she was instrumental in getting the FBI off my back that one time.

Ayah Bdeir

Ayah Bdier is the founder and CEO of littleBits, an award-winning platform of easy-to-use electronic building blocks that are empowering kids everywhere to create inventions large and small. Bdeir is an engineer, interactive artist, and one of the cofounders of the Open Hardware Summit. An alumna of the MIT Media Lab, Bdeir was named a TED Senior Fellow in 2013. She’s been featured on CNBC for building the future with next-generation toys, and talking about the importance of providing children with educational and gender-neutral toys.

These are just a few of the amazingly accomplished judges we have lined up to determine the winner of this year’s Hackaday Prize. The winner will be announced on November 3rd at the Hackaday Superconference. There are still tickets available, but if you can’t make it, don’t worry. We’re going to be live streaming everything, including the prize ceremony, where one team will walk away with the grand prize of $50,000. It’s not an event to miss.

The Incredible Judges Of The Hackaday Prize

October 15, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 1 Comment

The last challenge of The Hackaday Prize has ended. Over the past few months, we’ve gotten a sneak peek at over a thousand amazing projects, from Open Hardware to Human Computer Interfaces. This is a contest, though, and to decide the winner, we’re tapping some of the greats in the hardware world to judge these astonishing projects.

Below are just a preview of the judges in this year’s Hackaday Prize. In the next few weeks, we’ll be sending the judging sheets out to them, tallying the results, and in just under a month we’ll be announcing the winners of the Hackaday Prize at the Hackaday Superconference in Pasadena. This is not an event to be missed — not only are we going to hear some fantastic technical talks from the hardware greats, but we’re also going to see who will walk away with the Grand Prize of $50,000.

Sherry Huss

Sherry Huss is the former vice president of Maker Media, and oversees the publishing of Make Magazine and Maker Faires across the globe. Sherry is a major advocate of ‘all things maker’ in the global community, and her vision and passion for the maker movement was instrumental in growing the Make: brand within the maker ecosystem. Under her guidance, the largest Maker Faires, the Bay Area and World Maker Faire in New York, have grown from just a few thousand people in 2006 to events with over 200,000 attendees each year. Sherry is a giant in the Maker world, and an unending advocate of maker, DIY, and everyone who makes, whether that’s through wood, code, metal, solder, or fabric.

Anool Mahidharia

Anool is an electrical engineer, and works in Test & Measurement at Lumetronics. He’s part of WyoLum, an international group of hardware nerds who are consistently pumping out projects that push the limits of how blinky, glowey, and interesting a thing can be. They’re behind some projects you may have caught at random hacker meetups, and the creators of an absurd RGB LED cube that’s also a die. Anool is, by every account, an extremely capable hardware engineer, a longtime writer for Hackaday, and is constantly travelling the world presenting the latest developments in electronics to the public.

Danielle Applestone

Before founding Other Machine Co., now Bantam Tools, makers of tiny desktop milling machines that make fantastic circuit boards, Danielle Applestone worked with DARPA to develop high-precision machines that were effectively made out of kitchen cutting boards. HDPE, it turns out, is extraordinarily mechanically stable, cuts and machines easily, and can make very rigid components. Danielle spun this research out into the Othermill, an actual successful hardware startup. Danielle talked about this experience at the Hackaday Superconference, and we’re thrilled to have her on board judging other makers in their efforts to create the next big hardware thing.

Kwabena Agyeman

Kwab is one of the leading experts in computer vision and machine learning applications, and specializes in FPGA and Chip design. His greatest contribution to Open Hardware is the OpenMV, a platform for Computer Vision, ‘at the edge’, or basically a very high performance microcontroller and camera module on a single board, that’s running computer vision algorithms. This project began as a Hackaday Prize project that was then bootstrapped into a successful business. Formerly of Planet Labs where he spent his time pulling off Apollo 13-level hacks on space assets, Kwab is among the most successful designers in the world of Open Hardware.

These are just a few of the amazingly accomplished judges we have lined up to determine the winner of this year’s Hackaday Prize. The winner will be announced on November 3rd at the Hackaday Superconference. There are still tickets available, but if you can’t make it, don’t worry. We’re going to be live streaming everything, including the prize ceremony, where one team will walk away with the grand prize of $50,000. It’s not an event to miss.

The Incredible Judges Of The Hackaday Prize

October 8, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

The last challenge of The Hackaday Prize has just ended. Over the past few months, we’ve gotten a sneak peek at over a thousand amazing projects, from Open Hardware to Human Computer Interfaces. This is a contest, though, and to decide the winner, we’re tapping some of the greats in the hardware world to judge these astonishing projects.

Kipp Bradford

Kipp Bradford is a biomedical engineer and Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab. His work focuses on reinventing cool. He is a leader in the maker movement and has founded a variety of start-ups. He was a presenter at the Hackaday Superconference last year where he talked about the importance of building boring projects. It’s a great talk about Devices for Controlling Climates, or quite simply, an HVAC system. This isn’t a flashy project by any means — refrigeration has been around for a hundred years, and air conditioning has been common for fifty. Still, there’s a lot to learn about building infrastructure, and given the ubitquity of climate control systems, small efficiency gains can add up to a huge impact.

Madison Maxey

Madison Maxey is a internationally renowned technologist and multidisciplinary creative. Maxey has pioneered work in bringing flexible, robust circuitry to scale as Founder of LOOMIA, a technology that implants coats and jackets with soft, flexible circuitry that can heat, light, sense and track data. If you’re looking for wearable technology that isn’t made of copper and Kapton, look no further. LOOMIA has been featured by Business Insider, Forbes, and Huffington Post. This little bit of hardware can serve as a heater, keeping you warm, or as lighting to illuminate the headliner of a car or keep you visible at night. Maddy is a member of Forbes 30 under 30, a Thiel Fellow, and a Lord and Taylor Rose Award recipient.

Mark Rober

Mark Rober is a former NASA engineer, an inventor, and current YouTuber with nearly three million subscribers, all of them interested in science and engineering. He’s been featured on Hackaday numerous times for engineering the perfect throw for skipping a rock across a lake, filling a hot tub with sand, then swimming in it, building a dart board that always catches your dart for the perfect bullseye, and building the world’s largest Super Soaker (yes, it’s the classic, original Super Soaker). His work has been featured in dozens of publications around the Internet. Mark is full of awesome ideas and through his YouTube channel is able to explain science and engineering clearly to millions of people around the globe.

Colin Furze

Colin Furze is a mad Englishman in a shed who was formerly a plumber and now creates amazing inventions and incredible vehicles. His YouTube channel has over five million subscribers and his videos have been viewed over six hundred million times. He’s built a real hoverbike which must someday be taken to the forest moon of Endor, the world’s fastest bumper car that is also remarkably unsafe to actually use as a bumper car, and a knife that toasts bread as you slice it. But of course his most impressive achievement is gigantic pulse jet that was heard across the English Channel. And all of this without scorching his safety tie.

These are just four of the amazingly accomplished judges we have lined up to determine the winner of this year’s Hackaday Prize. The winner will be announced on November 3rd at the Hackaday Superconference. There are still tickets available, and you really want to be there if you can make it. Still, we’re going to be live streaming everything, including the prize ceremony, where one team will walk away with the grand prize of $50,000. It’s not an event to miss.