For the third straight year, our friends at Hackaday are encouraging Makers and engineers alike to build something that matters. In 2014, they were simply looking for open source, connected devices. In 2015, they were on the prowl for gadgets that could revolutionize the world. This year, though, they’re doing something a little different: they are expanding the frontiers of knowledge and engineering by hosting five rounds that will run consecutively, each for roughly five weeks.
This annual competition has become synonymous with creating for social change. Using your hardware, coding, scientific, design and mechanical abilities, you have the ability to make big changes in people’s lives. Every idea has impact, and a massive force of ideas creates real change. To get started, post your project on Hackaday.io and use the “Submit Project To…” part of your page to enter the 2016 contest. Keep in mind, however, you may not enter your exact 2014 or 2015 HaD entries again. (Projects with an old THP label will be disqualified.)
“Design an impactful project that suits you, or collaborate with someone else to do it. With our global collaboration platform, your project can be moving forward at all hours of the day. Create things like a better radiation monitoring system, a better calorimeter, open source instrumentation, digital logging scales and exercise trackers. Or go beyond that and create something that has never been seen before,” Hackaday explains.
20 projects will be selected from each of the five rounds, and awarded $1,000 per project. At the end of all five rounds, 100 projects in total will advance to the finals, where five will take home $150K, $25K, $10K, $10K and $5K. Plus, the first place project will win a residency in the SupplyFrame Design lab to develop their project further.
But that’s not all. The Hackaday crew has set aside $4,000 for seed money, which it will distribute to at least 20 entries with the most likes at the end of the first round. In other words, each time someone on Hackaday.io “likes” your project, it will move a bit higher on the leaderboard found on the Hackaday Prize page. The top projects will receive $1 for each like, with a max of $200 per entry so that at least 20 will win. The idea here is that the seed funding will serve as a little push to help offset the cost of building prototypes.
So far, both HaD Prize winners, SatNOGS and Eyedriveomatic, happened to be powered by Atmel technology. The question is, will 2016’s champion follow suit? Ready to get started? Then what are you waiting for?!