2022 Hackaday Prize: Congratulations To The Winners Of The Climate-Resilient Communities Challenge

September 28, 2022 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

Holy humanitarian hacking, Batman! We asked you to come up with your best climate-forward ideas, and you knocked it out of the ionosphere! Once again, the judges had a hard time narrowing down the field to just ten winners, but they ultimately pulled it off — and here are the prize-winning projects without much further ado.

In the Climate-Resilient Challenge, we asked you to design devices that help build communities’ resilience to severe weather and the increasing frequency of natural disasters due to climate change, and/or devices that collect environmental data that serves as hard evidence in the fight for changes in local infrastructure. While several people focused on air quality, which is something we tend to think of as a human need, plenty others thought of the flora and fauna with which we share this planet.

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2022 Hackaday Prize: Congratulations To The Winners Of The Hack It Back Challenge

August 9, 2022 by Elliot Williams 7 Comments

Wow! We knew that the Hack it Back Challenge round of the Hackaday Prize would bring out the clever repairers among you, but we’re still impressed to see the results! This was a tough round for the judges, but they came up with a short list of ten finalists, and we’re pleased to bring them to you here.

The Hack it Back Challenge aimed to keep old gear from being thrown away by performing a heroic repair, giving it a new purpose in life, or otherwise bringing it back to a useful state. Of course, once you’ve got the box open, you start thinking of how to improve whatever the gadget is, and some of our finalists took that in unexpected directions. Continue reading “2022 Hackaday Prize: Congratulations To The Winners Of The Hack It Back Challenge” →

2022 Hackaday Prize: Congratulations To The Planet-Friendly Power Finalists!

May 23, 2022 by Elliot Williams 1 Comment

The 2022 Hackaday Prize is focused on lightening our load on the planet, and one obvious way to do so is to get and store renewable power locally — the theme of our first challenge round: Planet-Friendly Power. Our judges have studied all the entries and their votes are in. All of these ten projects will receive $500 right now and are eligible for the Grand Prize of $50,000, to be announced in November.

Most of the alternative energy sources you’d expect to see were represented: solar, wind, and water. But everyone brought their own twists to the topic. For instance, the Low Cost Solar Panel Solution demonstrates that there’s a lot more to a DIY solar project than just the panel. You need to support it, protect it, turn it to face the sun, and convert and store the power harvested. And [JP Gleyzes] even goes so far as to use recycled water bottles to make the 3D-printed parts. Sun Chaser 2 puts the panel on wheels, driving it out of the shade to collect maximum energy in a real-world backyard situation. Cute!

Finally, we had two great kite projects to harvest wind with minimal setups on the go: Kite Propulsion and Energy Independence While Travelling. Both are still in the experimental stages, but both have great documentation of where the research projects stand.

Finally, Moss Microbial Fuel Cell is really out there on the edge of current research. Combining the reasonably well established microbial fuel cell with the photosynthetic power of moss, [Guru-san] is able to light an LED for a few seconds at a time. It’s not much, but it’s also a desktop-scale project. And who can say no to leaf-shaped capacitor circuit sculptures to store the energy?

Hacker Power!

Those are just a few of the ten finalists, listed here in no particular order. Congratulations to all of you! We’re excited to follow your projects along their journey, and wish you all the best.

Ten Finalists from Planet-Friendly Power

Congratulations Winners Of The 555 Timer Contest!

January 20, 2022 by Elliot Williams 25 Comments

Sometimes the best inspiration is limitation. The 555 timer does “one thing” — compares a voltage to a couple thresholds and outputs a signal accordingly. It’s two comparators, a voltage ladder, and a flip-flop. And yet, it’s the most sold single chip of all time, celebrating its 50th birthday this year! So when Hackaday runs a 555 Timer Contest, hackers of all stripes come out with their best work to show their love for the Little DIP That Could.

The Winners

Far and away the favorite entry was the Giant 555 Timer by [Rudraksha Vegad]. Every one of our judges rated it in the top five, and it took top honors twice. On its face, this is a simple “giant 555 in a box” build, but have a look under the hood. Each sub-module that makes up the 555 — comparators, flip-flop, and amplifier — are made from salvaged discrete parts in actual breadboard fashion, soldered to brass nails hammered into wood. As an end product, it’s a nice piece of woodworking, but as a process of creation, it’s a masterwork in understanding the 555 at its deepest level. We should all make one!

The Menorah555 is a simple design with some very nice tricks up its sleeve. Perhaps the cutest of which is pulling the central candle out and lighting the others with it — a trick that involves a supercapacitor and reed switches. Each of the candle lighting circuits, however, use a 555 timer both for its intended purpose of providing a timed power-on reset pulse, and another 555 is used as a simple flip-flop. It’s a slick design, and a great user interaction.

The Cyclotone Mechanical Punk Console Sequencer is a rotating tower of circuit sculpture and noisemakers. This one looks great, is amazingly well documented in the video series, and uses a billion clever little tricks along the way. The 555’s role? Each of the four levels is the classic Atari Punk Console circuit.

All three of these projects win a $150 shopping spree at Digi-Key. That’s a lot of timers!

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FlowIO Takes Top Honors In The 2021 Hackaday Prize

November 20, 2021 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

FlowIO Platform, a modular pneumatics controller for soft robotics and smart material projects, took home Grand Prize honors at the 2021 Hackaday Prize. Aside from the prestige of coming out on top of hundreds of projects and bragging rights for winning the biggest hardware design challenge on Earth, the prize carries an award of $25,000 and a Supplyframe DesignLab residency to continue project development. Four other top winners were also announced at the Hackaday Remoticon virtual conference on Saturday evening.

In a year full of challenges, this year’s Hackaday Prize laid down yet another gauntlet: to “Rethink, Refresh, and Rebuild.” We asked everyone to take a good hard look at the systems and processes that make the world work — or in some cases, not work — and reimagine them from a fresh perspective. Are there better ways to do things? What would you come up with if you started from a blank piece of paper? How can you support and engage the next generation of engineers, and inspire them to take up the torch? And what would you come up with if you just let your imagination run wild?

And boy, did you deliver! With almost 500 entries, this year’s judges had quite a task in front of them. Each of the five challenges — Refresh Displays, Rethink Work-From-Home Life, Reimagine Supportive Tech, Redefine Robots, and Reactivate Wildcard — had ten finalists, which formed the pool of entries for the overall prize. And here’s what they came up with.

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Spooky Winners Of The Halloween Hackfest Contest

November 4, 2021 by Kristina Panos No comments

It was a tight race, but the results of the Halloween Hackfest contest are in. We asked you to scare up a terrifying build in one of three categories, and as usual, you didn’t disappoint! These three hackers have each won a $150 shopping spree at Digi-Key to fund their future frights.

Best Undead Tech: 3-Axis Skull Mod for a 12-Foot Skeleton

Nelson Bairos

[Nelson] has been in the Halloween-based animatronics business for more than a decade, but always gets beaten to the punch when it comes to doing the really fun stuff like making things move and speak. Once [Nelson] got their hands on a 12-foot skeleton from the big box hardware store, it was time for the gloves to come off and the fun to begin.

The three axes of movement come from a rotation servo, a tilt servo, and a nod servo, all of which are connected to each other and the skeleton with 3D-printed supports. Lucky for us, [Nelson] documented this first build quite nicely and provided the 3D models, should you suddenly get the urge to go see if they have any of these magnificent skeletons left on clearance.

Best Haunted Smart House: Safety Coffin Grave Bell

Glen Atkins

What’s scarier than the undead? How about people who were buried alive, whether accidentally or not. Can you imagine hanging around in a graveyard, innocently doing tombstone rubbings or some ritualistic sacrifice when suddenly you hear someone ringing a bell and/or a terrified, muddled voice screaming for help?

[Glen Atkins]’ Safety Coffin Grave Bell build forgoes the body part, but in the dark, it’s easy to let your imagination run wild. It looks like a bell on a post, but pass too close and the ultrasonic rangefinder detects unsuspecting trick-or-treaters and gives them a scare by frantically ringing the bell with a big servo hidden inside. We hope they brought spare underwear.

Best Crazy Costume: Computer Head

Skye Rutan-bedard

[Skye] won a lot of people over last year with their computer head costume that featured a lone blinking eye and a voice. What those people didn’t know was that it suffered from three big problems: it had poor ergonomics from a heavy monitor shell, the blinkenlights matrix used to display emotions was underutilized, and using a keyboard proved to be an inconvenient UI for running the voice. This year, [Skye] set out to fix all the problems and make the costume even more awesome and comfortable to wear.

The brain of this computer head costume is a Raspberry Pi 4. As for [Skye]’s actual head, it is safely enclosed inside a hard hat that’s epoxied to the inside of the case. A wide range of emotions dance across the 16×16 RGB LED matrix that looks great behind some mirrored film, and they go great with the new voice method — [Skye] speaks softly into a small microphone, and the Raspi uses Mozilla’s DeepSpeech to repeat whatever they say in a robotic British accent.

Hack-y Halloween

Congratulations to all the winners, and a big thank you to all 45 entrants for your hair-raising hacks. Thank you also to Adafruit and Digi-Key for sponsoring this contest. We hope you had a great Halloween!

Meet The Winners Of The Hackaday Prize Round Four: Redefine Robots

October 7, 2021 by Elliot Williams 5 Comments

The judges’ ballots are in and we’re proud to present the ten winners of the fourth round of the 2021 Hackaday Prize. We love robots, and it’s obvious that you do too! The number and range of projects submitted this year were overwhelming.

No robotics round is complete without a robot arm, and while a few of them were in the finals, we especially liked CM6, which really pulled out all the stops. This is research-grade robotics on a not-quite-student budget, featuring custom compliant mechanisms so that it can play well with its fleshy companions.

With six degrees of freedom, and six motors, the drivetrain budget can quickly get out of hand on builds like these, so we’re especially happy to see custom, open, brushless-motor driver boards used to reduce the cost of admission. Even if you’re not going to make a 100% faithful CM6 clone, you’ll learn a lot just from going through the build. Oh, and did we mention it has a software stack? Continue reading “Meet The Winners Of The Hackaday Prize Round Four: Redefine Robots” →