The 2015 Hackaday Prize included something new: a prize for the Best Product. The winner took home $100k in funding, a six-month residency at the Supplyframe Design Lab in Pasadena, and help turning a budding product into a full-grown success. And the winner is…
Vinduino
Water is a crucial element for farming: the plants need enough, but not too much. Water is also an increasingly precious resource all over the world. In California, five times as much water is used in agriculture as is used by residential consumers. A 25% reduction in agricultural use, for instance, would entirely offset all urban water use. With this in mind, a number of California farmers are trying to voluntarily reduce their water consumption. But how?
One important development is targeted irrigation. Getting precisely the right amount of water to each plant can reduce the fraction lost to evaporation or runoff. It’s a small thing, but it’s a very big deal.
Cue Vinduino, a long-running project of “gentleman farmer” and hacker [Reinier van der Lee]. As a system, Vinduino aims to make it easy and relatively inexpensive to measure the amount of water in the soil at different depths, to log this information, and to eventually tailor the farm’s water usage to the plants and their environment. We were able to catch up with [Reinier] at the Hackaday SuperConference the day after results were announced. He shared his story of developing Vinduino and recounts how he felt when it was named Best Product:
The product that won Best Product is simple, but very well executed. It’s a hand-held soil moisture sensor reader that couples with a DIY soil probe design to create a versatile and inexpensive system. All of the 2015 Best Product Finalists were exceptional. Vinduino’s attention to detail, room for expansion, and the potential to help the world pushed this project over the top.
Best. Conference. Ever. And believe it or not, I don’t think this is a biased opinion.
I am of course talking about the Hackaday SuperConference – the first full-blown hardware conference we’ve ever put together. I had very high hopes going into this and was still utterly astounded by how the two-day event turned out. Let me give you three reasons why it was spectacular: The people, the people, the people.
The Presenters
[Shanni Prutchi] presenting her talk about Quantum EntanglementOur call for proposals didn’t go out months ahead of time, instead it was mere weeks, yet we were flooded with around 160 proposals. It was a tough proposition to whittle this down to 30+ talks and workshops, but we had to because of time and space limits. Every presenter made it count. We are honored by this diverse set of people who laid down an enthralling collection of talks about hardware creation.
Just to give you a taste: the first talk, presented by Shanni Prutchi, covered the hardware used in quantum entanglement research. Quantum Entanglement Research! This highly technical subject might seem like a lot for a Saturday morning, but Shanni has a gift for explaining her work. Every person in the room was engaged throughout and stayed this way through the entire weekend.
Packed house during the talks
SuperCon was a hardware conference that was actually about hardware. We could tell something magical was happening when we had to hunt down more chairs (borrowed from an off-site venue) to accommodate all of the people who wanted to hear the presentations. We know that the hardware community yearns for talks that go far beyond being shiny and deliver the details you need to grow your own set of engineering talents. The extra-chair anecdote proves the need for more opportunities to learn and interact with experts of hardware creation.
Don’t worry, we recorded every single one of these fantastic presentations. It will take time to edit the content but it will be freely available soon. If you’re excited about your own work and can speak about it with authority, you need to be at next year’s Hackaday SuperConference. I promise we’ll call for proposals further in advance for the next one, but start your talk prep now. You won’t want to miss it.
[Paul Stoffregen] leading his Advance Microcontroller Based Audio workshopConspicuously missing from our story so far are the hands-on workshops which ran concurrently with the talk track. Every workshop was sold out, and every extra chair was occupied by those who wanted to audit. Much of the workshop material is already online, and we’ll get a dedicated post out to help link you with that information.
The Attendees
Talk about the most amazing group of people to spend 30 hours with over two days. The 300 people who packed Dogpatch Studios to capacity made it impossible to have anything but a great time at the conference. These are all people with passion for hardware – I was tripping over fascinating conversations at every step.
Badge hackers hard at work as talks continue just to the left
We blocked out a few places in the schedule for lightning talks. Everyone was encouraged to sign up and participate. Since the majority of people at the conference brought hardware to show off, these blocks were as popular as the more formal presentations.
This is also how the badge hacking was presented. Conference badges were PCBs with no components. Off to the side were tables strewn with components and tools so that you could work on your badge and watch the talks at the same time. Those seats were constantly occupied. As the end of the day approached on Sunday, we had around twenty people present what they had created on this blank slate. And yes, we’ll be covering this in-depth soon so stay tuned.
The Workers
Registration did a great job of clearing this line once the doors opened
You can have talented presenters and eager attendees, but it takes a lot of hard work to keep everything running smoothly and bring the two groups together.
We had an army of volunteers and a gaggle of staff who worked together like a high-functioning machine. Registration was quick and efficient and transitions between workshops were smooth and calm. The WiFi worked (conferences are notorious for not having connectivity) and the speakers had the A/V resources they needed. There were plenty of beverages, snacks, and meals. The workers of the SuperCon — all of them hardware-lovers too — had a personal stake in pulling this off. Mission accomplished. You all rock!
We Are a Community
The SuperConference felt like home. New acquaintances treated each other like life-long friends. Everyone brought their hardware passion and treated one another as equals. And as has been proven time and again, Hackaday is a community and great things happen when we all get together with purpose. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who made this possible.
Last year marked the first-ever Hackaday Prize, where we challenged you to build a connected device so compelling that we’d send you to space. We awarded the Prize at a party following a day-long, multi-track hackathon in Munich, Germany. A great time was had by all.
This year, the Hackaday Prize itself is even bigger, the challenge even more ambitious, and the festivities are going to be even grander. So come join us in San Francisco this coming Saturday as we award the 2015 Hackaday Prize and throw a (free) prize party to celebrate!
The awards will be part of the first-ever Hackaday SuperConference. We’re bringing together the best minds in hardware hacking and there’s a place for you. The conference will be packed with hardware workshops, talks, food, and fun. (Don’t delay — you have three more days to buy a SuperConference ticket before prices double.) The super-charged scheduled of events have just been published.
Directly after the SuperConference, we’re opening the doors to everyone at 5:30pm — whether you’re attending the conference or not — for the presentation ceremony followed by the Hackaday Prize Party. Many of our judges will be on hand to present the prizes and to socialize afterward: Elecia White, Lenore Edman, Windell Oskay, Ben Krasnow and Peter Dokter. Get your free Awards Ceremony ticket now!
As you know, the grand prize is a Trip to Space for the project most likely to help solve some of our hardest challenges. Come cheer for your favorite!
Because we had so many polished projects last year, we’ve also expanded the Hackaday Prize in 2015 to include a Best Product award. Seven of the ten finalists will be on hand to find out who will go away with $100,000 in cash and a residency at the Supplyframe Design Lab in Pasadena. It’s going to be an exciting night.
Dinner is included with this free event, there will be a cash bar, and the music and festivities will carry on until 10:30pm. Please RSVP to help us plan the dinner arrangements. See you on Saturday!
The Hackaday SuperConference is just eleven short days from now! We’ve put together a conference that is all about hardware creation with a side of science and art. Join hundreds of amazing people along with Hackaday crew for a weekend of talks, workshops, and socializing.
Below you will find the full slate of talks, and last week we revealed the lineup of hands-on workshops. We’ve expanded a few of the more popular workshops. If you previously tried to get a ticket and found they were sold out, please check again. We know many of you are working on impressive projects in your workshops, so bring them and sign up for a lightning talk at registration.
Today, Hackaday.io passed 100,000 registered users. It seems like yesterday that I wrote a post about passing 10k but that was last year already! Much has happened in that year, and there is much more to come. Thank you to everyone that makes Hackaday.io great by interacting with each other, posting about what is going on in basements, garages, hackerspaces, and workplaces, and finding new and interesting ways of making the site your very own. Your involvement has made Hackaday.io the greatest open source hardware resource in the world.
We don’t call it project hosting. The seed idea did start as project hosting for the hardware hacker, but Hackaday.io has long since outgrown that pair of shoes. It’s become a self-sustaining reaction that grows ever bigger and more awesome as everyone gets involved and decides how and what they want to do.
One of the major additions to Hackaday.io this year was group messaging. This spawned an explosion of new communities within Hackaday.io starting with the Hacker Channel. Anyone may request to be a team member and will then gain access to the group messaging; there are now well over 500 members. We’ve scheduled many somewhat-formal events on the channel over the last few months that invited people to show off what they’re building and ask for feedback. That evolved into topic-based sessions on things like FPGA design and what you need to know about manufacturing. Many of these were co-hosted by Hackaday Staff and community members.
This bizarre text is part of the itanimulli profile
A curious event on the site was the appearance of the user itanimulli who join and registered the vanity URL: /conspiracy. This is an enigma. The user is a puzzler and has posted a number of images and other challenges that appear to include hidden data. How do you solve something like this? Get all of your friends involved, of course! Thomas Wilson started a project to solve the itanimulli puzzle and posted about it on the stack to invite teammates to the challenge.
Hackaday.io has spilled over into the real world too. Do you ever look at the valuable odds and ends in your workshop that you know someone will use, but you never will? The Travelling Hacker Box is the answer to that conundrum. It’s the “take a penny, leave a penny” of the hacker world. Get on the project and get in line to receive the box. When it hits your workshop, take out something cool but then we want to see you build something with it! Replace what you took with something of your own and send it to the next person. International shipping has not been solved yet for this particular box, but nothing is stopping you from starting an EU version.
The support we’ve seen from the hardware community for Hackaday.io is one of the reasons we’ve set out to do something new. In just a few weeks the first ever Hackaday SuperConference will be held. Two days of talks and workshops let us meet in person the users we’ve grown close to through the site. I hope to see you there. But if not just ping me on Hackaday.io!
Or course 100k isn’t the only interesting number. We’ve got more juicy statistics in the image below.
The judges of the 2015 Hackaday Prize are hard at work right now to choose the five finalists who will receive the top prizes for the 2015 Hackaday Prize. The Judges for the Best Product have finished their work, and the announcements for all of these amazing engineering projects is just around the corner. We’ll be making the announcement in front of a live audience at the Hackaday SuperConference in just two weeks!
It has been amazing to see hundreds of people from the Hackaday Community who took time out of their lives to build something that matters and to document it as their entry. This has far-reaching benefits that will echo for years to come. No matter where your project finishes, standing up and saying “here’s something I built from an idea I had” is an amazing thing. Great work!
We are profoundly thankful for the visionary companies that sponsored the 2015 Hackaday Prize. Atmel, Freescale, Microchip, Mouser, and Texas Instruments made so much of this year’s prize possible. They recognize what it means to use Open Design; a philosophy that lets talented people pass on their skills by their engineering examples.
A big part of their support this year has gone to hosting live events. Hackaday Prize Worldwide was held in Chicago, Mumbai, Toronto, New York, Bangalore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Shenzhen, New Delhi, Boston, Washington DC, Zurich, and Berlin. Their involvement continues with the presentation planned on Saturday November 14th at the Hackaday SuperConference.
Mouser Electronics has partnered with Grant Imahara of MythBusters fame. Grant is a talented roboticist who will have a talk and Q&A session at the SuperCon about his career. Microchip is giving away [Lucio Di Jasio’s] new book on microcontrollers to conference attendees. Atmel leapt at the opportunity to send development hardware for [Colin O’Flynn’s] workshop (he took Second Place in the 2014 Hackaday Prize), helping to lower the workshop cost for the participants.
Of course, it’s not just the events that were possible due to these sponsorship. Along with Supplyframe who presents the Hackaday Prize each year, these sponsors made the total prize package of about $500,000 a reality. It’s not everyday you can give away a trip into space as a Grand Prize and $100,000 for the Best Product. This is an amazing way to support the hardware ideals we live by and we applaud our sponsors for their meaningful involvement.
We have been amazed by all of the talented people who submitted workshop proposals for the Hackaday SuperConference. With proposals made, and invitations accepted it’s time to announce the full slate of workshops you’ll find at this epic event.
For those just tuning in, Hackaday will host the hardware con you’ve been waiting for on November 14th and 15th at DogPatch Studios in San Francisco. The gorgeous venue will be packed with amazing people, both presenters and attendees. A single talk track will run the entire weekend while multiple workshops run on a different floor.
Put yourself in the middle of it all and be amazed by all we have in store. Apply for your ticket now!
Water is a crucial element for farming: the plants need enough, but not too much. Water is also an increasingly precious resource all over the world. In California, five times as much water is used in agriculture as is used by residential consumers. A 25% reduction in agricultural use, for instance, would entirely offset all urban water use. With this in mind, a number of California farmers are trying to voluntarily reduce their water consumption. But how?
![[Shanni Prutchi] presenting her talk about Quantum Entanglement](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/shanni-prutchi-talk-contrast-adjusted.jpg?w=800)
![[Paul Stoffregen] leading his Advance Microcontroller Based Audio workshop](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/dsc7228.jpg?w=800)
Directly after the SuperConference, we’re opening the doors to everyone at 5:30pm — whether you’re attending the conference or not — for the presentation ceremony followed by the Hackaday Prize Party. Many of our judges will be on hand to present the prizes and to socialize afterward: Elecia White, Lenore Edman, Windell Oskay, Ben Krasnow and Peter Dokter. 
One of the major additions to Hackaday.io this year was group messaging. This spawned an explosion of new communities within Hackaday.io starting with 
