Hackaday offers a trip into space for the best do-it-yourself hardware

Hardware hackers, hear this. If you can design the best do-it-yourself hardware, you can win a trip into space.

Through its Hackaday.com website, SupplyFrame is offering The Hackaday Prize, a hardware contest where the grand prize is an all-expense-paid trip to space on a carrier of your choice. The call for entries is now open. The prize is a recognition of the growing movement of hardware hackers who celebrate do-it-yourself, innovative, open hardware projects, said program director Kathy Astromoff in an interview with VentureBeat.

“This is aimed at bringing new blood into hardware hacking and engineering,” Astromoff said.

If you don’t want the space trip, you can choose to get $196,418 in cash. That amount is a Fibonacci number, a specific set of integers in math.

The winner can hitch a ride on any galactic space company, including Virgin Galactic. Other prizes include team sky diving, a paid trip to the Akihabara electronics district in Japan, and hardware-hacking tools such as milling and tooling machines and 3D printers.

“We launched The Hackaday Prize because we want to see the next evolution of hardware happen right now, and we want it to be open,” said Mike Szczys, managing editor of Hackaday.com.

The peer judges include some notable figures in hardware hacking:

• Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, Ronin, @bunniestudios
• Jack Ganssle, The Ganssle Group, ganssle.com
• Joe Grand, Grand Idea Studio, @joegrand
• Sprite_TM, Spritesmods.com, @SpritesMods
• Limor “Ladyada” Fried, Adafruit, @adafruit
• Dave Jones, eevblog.com, @eevblog
• Elecia White, Logical Elegance, @logicalelegance
• Ian Lesnet, Dangerous Prototypes, @dangerousproto

“One of the reasons I got my start in embedded systems development was because of a contest I entered when I was in college,” said Huang. “I hope this contest will encourage more engineers to ‘get out the hack’ and build more open hardware.”

The preliminary submissions will be accepted through June 28 for contestants over 13. The awards will be judged on the basis of actual physical hardware built, the ability to connect to the Internet, and the degree of openness based on the use of open-source technologies. The Hackaday Prize is sponsored by Pasadena, Calif.-based SupplyFrame, a tech and media company that targets electronics professionals. Its Hackaday Projects has 800 hardware projects go live since February.

The winner will be announced at the Electronica event in Munich on Nov. 10.