Have you been to space? I’m 99.999 percent certain that 100 percent of the people who will read this haven’t. There are quite a few options available to aspiring spacefarers, most of which involve having a lot of money and waiting a very long time. If you can afford neither of these luxuries, there’s another way – all you have to do is win the Hackaday Prize.
Idealist hacking community, Hackaday is calling on makers and hardware hackers to create cool open connected devices that will actually change, and hopefully improve, our world. For a trip to space.
Yes. The winner of the hackathon gets a trip to Space on any carrier of their choosing (Or US$196,418 in cash, recognize the Fibonacci number?). Space might be the biggest prize there, but the prize pool is probably the coolest in hardware hacking history – $10k 3D printers, state of the art milling machines, team skydiving, an all-expense paid trip to the Akihabara electronics district in Japan among others.
An important request (not requirement) in the competition is that the designs and hacks be open source, so that the entries will be mostly easy for anybody to make at home. The entries will be judged on openness, the basis of actual physical hardware built and the ability to connect to the Internet, so it will be a “thing” in the Internet of Things.
The peer judges include some notable figures in hardware hacking; Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, Ronin, Jack Ganssle, The Ganssle Group, Joe Grand, Grand Idea Studio, Sprite_TM, Spritesmods.com, Limor “Ladyada” Fried, Adafruit, Dave Jones, eevblog.com, Elecia White, Logical Elegance, Ian Lesnet, Dangerous Prototypes.
So enter your project now. Entries are already rolling in, so if you are interested, you can check out your competition before getting to work. Deadline for entry submissions is August 4th, 2014.
