astronaut or astronot

10 Articles

Astronaut Or Astronot: Somebody Won Something!

August 15, 2014 by 6 Comments

It’s time once again for our weekly installment of people complaining about our community voting system for The Hackaday Prize! The theme this week – as it was last week – is ‘too cool for Kickstarter’. We’re looking for projects that are so awesome they would never see any mainstream appeal. If you’re still wondering what we mean by that, if this amazing project doesn’t make the top ten in this round of voting, I’ll be terribly disappointed.

Just like last week, we’re trying to give away a goodie bag of programmers, dev boards, and essential bench tools (prize list here) to someone on hackaday.io who has voted for a project that is too cool for Kickstarter.

This week one of you got lucky. Because [Eric] is such a good sport and was kind enough to click a few buttons during this round of community voting, we’re sending him a boat load of dev boards, all the programmers he’ll ever need, a meter that will last him for the rest of his life, and a pretty good power supply. Awesome. Now go congratulate him.

There’s only five days left until the cutoff, so get your project into The Hackaday Prize. At this stage the requirements are extremely minimal, and you can knock everything out in a few hours.

Astronaut Or Astronot: Totally Giving Away A Power Supply

August 1, 2014 by 21 Comments

Hey! It’s time for another round of Astronaut or Astronot, where we try to give away a jumbo power supply to someone on hackaday.io if they have voted in the most recent community voting round.

Before I get around to telling you who won, we need to go over the criticism of the current voting scheme. There’s a lot of valid criticism out there about how the algorithm that presents projects to the voting page is broken. Yes, it weights projects so some are seen more often than others. And yes, it can be frustrating. However, the results of the voting have no bearing on The Hackaday Prize (the space thing), and the purpose of the entire community voting is to get people looking at the projects, give away t-shirts to the project creators and 3D printers, o-scopes, and power supplies to random people who have voted. We listened to your suggestions and we’re tweaking the algorithm that presents projects for the next round of voting. That starts Monday, we’re doing the drawing on Wednesday, and votes don’t carry over from round to round.

With that out of the way, it’s time to do the whole ‘pick a random person on hackaday.io and see if they voted’ thing. For this week’s lottery, I chose five random people on the site, hoping I wouldn’t go through all of them before giving away a nice bench power supply. The first person, [in3rtial], didn’t vote. You just lost out on a really cool prize there, man.

The second person randomly selected was [tyler]. He voted a total of six times this round. I voted fifty times, but we’re not picky. That means he wins a nice power supply. Everyone go congratulate him for living somewhere that’s cheap to ship a power supply to.

That’s it for this round of Astronaut or Astronot. We’ll have a new round of voting up on Monday. For a change of pace (and because we’re going to be at DEFCON at this time next week), we’re going to do the drawing on Wednesday nevermind, we’re totally doing the drawing from DEFCON. Oh, and if you haven’t, you might want to submit a project to The Hackaday Prize. There’s still time, and your odds of winning something are really, really good.

Cosmonaut Or Taikonot: Vote For The Most Outrageous Component

July 24, 2014 by 6 Comments

We have a new round of Astronaut or Astronot, the little community voting thing we’re doing for The Hackaday Prize. Why should you care? Because tomorrow (Friday, 10:00 AM Eastern) we’re doing a voters lottery. We’re selecting a random person on hackaday.io, and if that person has voted, they win a pretty awesome bench power supply.

Why are we telling you this now? Because voting in previous rounds doesn’t count for this round. If you want to nab a power supply, you need to vote. We previously gave away an awesome scope, and a very cool 3D printer to a random person on hackaday.io. Judging from previous rounds, I’d guess the odds of us giving away the supply this week are pretty good, but I’m not doing those maths right now. I’ll post a video of the drawing tomorrow around 10:30 Eastern.