trinket contest

11 Articles

Trinket Contest Winners

November 8, 2013 by 29 Comments

trinket-contest-winners

Originally Adafruit offered us 20 boards to give away. But when we had so many interesting submissions they were kind enough to throw in some more. We took them up on it, eventually choosing 41 winners… and believe us when we say it was difficult to whittle it down to that number! Thank you to all who took the time and made the effort to send something in.

Organizationally it’s been a challenge keeping all of the submissions straight. That’s why the presentation of the top entries is listed as a set of galleries. More info on each is available on their associated update posts. Congratulations to all! We want to do more giveaways in this same spirit (with different prize hardware and submission themes each time). If you’re interested in that please let us leave your words of encouragement in the comments.

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Hackaday Logo Projector From A Single LED

October 31, 2013 by 11 Comments

Here’s another Trinket Contest entry that was interesting enough for its own feature. [Adam] made his own Hackaday version of the Bat signal. It’s not nearly as big, but the concept is the same. Using this single modified LED he’s able to project a 12″ image that seems quite well-defined (more pictures below).

The LED is one he pulled from an old flashlight. After sanding the dome flat he made a jig which positioned it inside of his laser cutter. From there he etched the 0.1″ logo and filled the negative space with some ink. The remaining surface was polished to help the light shine through, then positioned in front of a jeweler’s loupe to magnify the image.

There’s just a couple of hours left before the Trinket Contest draws to a close. Get your entry in for a chance to win!

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Trinket Contest Update #4

October 31, 2013 by 8 Comments

trinket-contest-update-4

Today is the last day to get your Trinket Contest entries into us! After the break you’ll find another dozen that were sent in. If you’re waiting to see your own appear here please be patient as we’ve got a lot to wade through.

The contest asks you slap the Hackaday logo onto something for a chance at winning one of 20 Trinket dev boards donated by Adafruit for this contest.

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Compass Guided Kayak Autopilot

October 29, 2013 by 15 Comments

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Last July, [Louis] bought a kayak off of Craigslist. It was a pedal-powered device with a hand-operated rudder, and he ended up enjoying his time on the water. [Louis] fishes, though, and it was a bit of a challenge to manage hands free fishing while maintaining a steady course. His solution was an Arduino-powered autopilot that allows him to troll for salmon and Arduino haters with just the push of a button.

In [Louis]’ system, a motor is attached to the steering lever along with a few limit switches. This motor is powered by an Arduino controlled with an LSM303 compass module from Sparkfun.

When the autopilot module is started up, it first checks to see if the compass module is enabled. If not, the system relies on two tact switches to change the position of the rudder. Enabling the compass requires a short calibration of spinning the kayak around in a circle, but after that the steering is dead on.

There are a few things [Louis] would like to add such as a heading display and a bluetooth module for remote control. This setup already landed him a 13 lb salmon, so we’re going to say it’s good enough to catch some dinner.