Sometimes the tightest constraints inspire the highest creativity. The 2024 Tiny Games Challenge invites you to have the most fun with the most minimal setup. Whether that’s tiny size, tiny parts count, or tiny code, we want you to show us that big fun can come in small packages.
The Tiny Games Challenge starts now and runs through September 10th, with the top three entries receiving a $150 gift certificate courtesy of DigiKey.
Home automation is huge right now in consumer electronics, but despite the wide availability of products on the market, hackers and makers are still spinning up their own solutions. It could be because their situations are unique enough that commercial offerings wouldn’t cut it, or perhaps they know how cheaply many automation tasks can be implemented with today’s microcontrollers. Still others go the DIY route because they’re worried about the privacy implications of pushing such a system into the cloud.
Seeing how many of you were out there brewing bespoke automation setups gave us the idea for this year’s Home Sweet Home Automation contest, which just wrapped up last week. We received more than 80 entries for this one, and the competition was fierce. Judging these contests is always exceptionally difficult, as nearly every entry is a standout accomplishment in its own way.
But the judges forged ahead valiantly, and we now have the top three projects which will be receiving $150 in store credit from the folks at DigiKey.
Continue reading “2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: The Winners Are In”
Your home is your castle, and what’s better than a fully automatic castle? Nothing! That’s why we’re inviting you to submit your sweetest home automation hacks for a chance to win one of three $150 DigiKey gift certificates. The contest starts now and runs until April 16th.
Whether you’re focused on making your life easier, saving energy, gathering up all the data about your usage patterns, or simply stringing some random functions together and calling it a “system,” we’d like to see it. Nothing is too big or too small if it makes your home life easier.
Home is where the home automation is!
To enter, head over to Hackaday IO and start documenting your project there. We are, of course, interested in learning from what you’ve done, so the better the docs, the better your chances of winning. And if you need some inspiration, check out these honorable mention categories.
Thanks again to DigiKey for sponsoring this with three gift certificates!
With the zombies, ghouls, and ghosts now safely returned to their crypts until next October, it’s time to unveil this year’s winners for the 2023 Halloween Hackfest.
For this contest, sponsors DigiKey and Arduino challenged the community to come up with their best creations for what’s arguably the most hacker-friendly of holidays. Pretty much everything was fair game, from costumes to decorations. The top three winners will get $150 credit from DigiKey and some treats from Arduino — just don’t try to eat them.
Continue reading “2023 Halloween Hackfest: This Year’s Spooky Winners”
Just as the Jedi youngling would have to build their light saber, so is it a rite of passage for a true geek to build their own computer interfaces. And nothing makes a personal computer more personal than a custom keyboard, a bespoke mouse, an omnipotent macropad, a snazzy jog wheel, or a fancy flight yoke.
In this contest, we encourage you to make your strangest, fanciest, flashiest, or most custom computer peripherals, and share that work with all the rest of us. Wired or wireless, weird or wonderful, we want to see it. And Digi-Key is sponsoring this contest to offer three winners an online shopping spree for $150 each at their warehouse! More parts, more projects.
Anyone can just go out an buy a keyboard, but if you want a custom ergonomic keyboard that’s exactly fit to your own two hands, you probably have to make one with your own two hands. And if you an engraved brass mouse, well, you’ve got some engraving to do — Logitech ain’t gonna make one for you. Maybe you only type in binary, or maybe you need a keyboard for some alien language that has 450 individual letters. Or maybe the tiniest keyboard ever? You’ve got this. Continue reading “Show Us Your Odd Inputs And Peculiar Peripherals!”
It’s hard to beat the fidelity and durability of printed text on paper. But the e-paper display gets pretty close, and if you couple it will great design and dependable features, you might just prefer an e-reader over a bookshelf full of paperbacks. What if the deal is sweetened by making it Open Hardware? The Open Book Project rises to that challenge and has just been named the winner of the Take Flight with Feather contest.
This e-reader will now find its way into the wild, with a small manufacturing run to be put into stock by Digi-Key who sponsored this contest. Let’s take a closer look at the Open Book, as well as the five other top entries.
Continue reading “Winners Of The Take Flight With Feather Contest”
Sometimes finding a short-circuit is easy, especially after the magic smoke has escaped. Finding a short on a newly etched or milled board though, can be a maddening task. Many of us have been there – wrestling with multimeter probes under a magnifier trying to find the offending bit of copper that is the source of all our problems. [Jaromir] designed Shorty to make this task a little bit easier.
Shorty is a short-circuit finder – but it’s not exactly like the one you would find on a typical multimeter. [Jaromir] used MCP6041 Op-Amp to detect resistances down to the order of tens of milliohms. Determining an exact resistance measurement at these levels would require a heck of a lot of calibration. When looking for a short though, [Jaromir] is only concerned with the relative value – is he getting closer to or further away from the short. He determines this by sound. The Op-Amp output is sent to the Pro Trinket’s ADC input. The trinket drives a speaker with lower or higher tones based upon the ADC voltage. Much like the childhood game of “hot and cold”, Shorty will direct you right to your short!
There’s still time to enter the Trinket Everyday Carry Contest. The main contest runs until January 2, but we’re having random drawings every week! Don’t forget to write a project log before the next drawing at 9pm EST on Tuesday, December 30th. You and all of the other entrants have a chance to win a Teensy 3.1 from The Hackaday Store!
