Legion of #Hackers Connect in Pasadena for 2019 Hackaday Superconference
By Madison Hoiby, Pasadena Media News
Engineers, hackers and builders from around the world gathered at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference to discuss the latest innovations taking over the hardware and technology industries. From Nov. 15–17, Supplyframe DesignLab and LA College of Music filled with hundreds of eager creators seeking to celebrate with and learn from each other. Complete with workshops, badgehacking and a long anticipated award ceremony, this year’s Hackaday Superconference was nothing short of a hardware enthusiast’s paradise.
The three-day conference lead up to the Hackaday Prize Ceremony, which presented Supplyframe’s global engineering initiative striving to advance open source technology. Hosted by Designer and Curator at Supplyframe DesignLab, Majenta Strongheart, and Editor in Chief of Hackaday, Mike Szczys, the ceremony distributed eleven awards totaling over $200,000 in prize money.
This year’s prize ceremony focused on product development. In September, judges narrowed down the entries to 20 finalists, all of which were recognized at the ceremony. For the first time, Hackaday offered a mentor program during the first two months of the competition. Here, participants could join online sessions to interact with their peers and gain feedback from volunteer mentors.
The $125,000 Hackaday Grand Prize went to FieldKit, a durable, open-source, modular sensor system used for conducting field-based research. The creators believe in providing reliable, scientifically relevant equipment at an affordable cost, to enable as many people as possible to contribute to environmental research.
The developers have worked with scientists in South America and Africa, and recognized that access to expensive, up-to-date technology can be unattainable in many scenarios. Learning this, they began creating tools to help scientists with accessibility, and gradually refined their ideas to form the premise of FieldKit. As of now, they’ve successfully deployed FieldKit in Southern Africa and the Amazon Rainforest, and plan to continue expanding until they’ve reached every continent and every ocean.
“I think we see this planet changing faster and faster with every coming year, and the tools to actually do something about it is just not accelerating,” FieldKit Team Leader Shah Selbe said. “We’re hoping to help inspire that next generation of planetarian understanding.”
Aside from the grand prize award, the Hackaday Prize Ceremony featured ten other note-worthy projects, including honorable mentions and $10,000 “Best Of” awards in five categories: Concept, Design, Production, Benchmark and Communication.
The Best Concept Award focused on originality and innovative solutions, and recognized the 3D Printed Prosthesis with CV, BCI and EMG, a prosthetic hand that employs Computer Vision to automatically adjust grip methods in given circumstances. Living in Vietnam, Creator Nguyễn Phương Duy began structuring the prosthesis to help a patient with congenital limb deficiency.
The Best Design Award went to DLT One, an open source Linux tablet that can be individually modified to fit user needs. The tablet strives to bring the modularity of a desktop PC to mobile devices. The creator lives in Germany, yet remains active with the hackaday community by engaging on hackaday.io and Twitter.
“This is really the community event where all these people come together to share their knowledge and ideas.” Creator Timon said. “It’s nice for me to come here even though it’s far away.”
Axiom: 100+kW Motor Controller was named Best Production for its impressive non-proprietary high-power motor control. The 3 phase motor controller generates 3 sine waves, allowing it to consistently flow 300Amps. The team formed 4 years ago and has been creating flexible prototypes for the open source community ever since. Like many members of hackaday.io community, the Axiom team frequently communicates online. Amazingly, the team met for the first time face-to-face the day they claimed their prize.
The Best Benchmark Award was based on competitive analysis, that is, comparing projects to other technologies on the market. The award went to Knobo, a computer application and HID that uses text-to-speech technology to advance Braille education. The creator, 17-year-old Gary Peng, wants to help the visually impaired learn braille independently and become competitive for employment.
“The advancement of audio text-to-speech technology eliminates the need for the visually impaired to learn braille to gather information.” Peng said. “Instead of using text-to-speech technology to harm the braille education, I’m actually using the technology to help the braille education.”
The Best Communication Award was granted to SmallKat, an affordable quadrupedal platform curated for academia. Created by a team of graduates from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the device serves to spread robotics education to the next generation of innovators.
A project in each of the five categories was also recognized with an honorable mention, receiving $3,000 for their advancements of open source technology.
Unfolding Space, a glove navigation aid system for the visually impaired, was recognized in the Best Concept category. Best Design honored uECG, an affordable electrocardiogram (ECG) wearable that can stream real time ECG signals. DrumKid, an aleatoric drum machine fit for live performance, was recognized in Best Production. Best Benchmark went to the Electronic Dice, a set of customizable dice that can be configured through Bluetooth. Lastly, for Best Communication, the judges recognized Open Hardware Fast High Resolution LASER, which uses a rotating prism laser head to excel Printed Circuit Board (PCB) manufacturing and 3D printing.
Many of the 20 finalists had their projects out for display in the Supplyframe DesignLab, where attendees could visit, test out prototypes and ask questions to learn more about the emerging technologies. However, if guests lost track of time exploring workshops or coding at hacker village, they can go to hackaday.io for a full list of project pages. The pages provide in-depth descriptions of each entry, following the competitors through their conceptualization and development process, as well as their goals for the future.
To wrap up the 2019 Hackaday Prize Ceremony, Award Host Mike Szczy left attendees with insight to carry on to upcoming years.
“It’s really easy to get caught up in a $125,000 grand prize [and] all of these top projects.” Szczys said. “…but the thing that we have to remember is that the point of this is to get more people involved in solving problems, to get more people to think about engineering and to think about pushing their own skills.”
To learn more or stay updated for next Supplyframe Hackaday Superconference, please visit the website. Special thanks to Madison Hoiby from Pasadena Media for writing this piece. And remember, #StayInnovative!
