Reimagine Supportive Tech For The Newest Hackaday Prize Challenge

Starting now, the Hakkai Award for 2021 challenges you Reimagine Supporting equipment. Honestly, it’s all about shortcuts to success. Can we make it easier for people to learn more about science and technology? Can we remove some barriers that prevent people from doing DIY as a hobby (or lifestyle)? What can we do to build on each other’s experience and skills?

For example, to get into building your own electronics, you need a huge specialized electronics lab, right? Of course, this is nonsense, but we only know this because we have already entered the elbows to soldering stations and vacuum tweezers. To the outsider, this looks like a mountain that cannot be climbed. What if I told you that you could build electricity at any desk and make it easier to store everything between hacking sessions? That sounds like work for [M.Hehr’s] project for portable work table and mini laboratory. Here’s a plan that can take a beginner from scratch to soldering smoke while having fun on the road.

What about breaking down complex topics into something we beginners can absorb? Radio signals are all around us, but again the barriers to entering the SDR are many and varied. Much of the supporting technology would be a project that shows simple hardware and shares a virtual machine with open source software that is already set up to work. A beginner could choose something like this and listen to transponders from planes that pass in a few hours.

If you are reading this, you have probably spent countless happy hours learning how to do some difficult and fascinating things. Share the wealth! Take an existing hardware concept and make it modular and easy to use. Refine an existing design to make it more accessible to users with any set of mobility challenges. Or put together a project suitable for beginners to move STEM education forward.

Ten finalists in this round will win $ 500 and will be entered in the final round, judging in October, for a chance at the $ 25,000 Hackaday Prize and four other major prizes. Launch your Hackaday.io project page and use the drop-down menu in the left sidebar to enter it Hakkadai Award for 2021.