Get Hackaday-ing

By David G. Simmons / Product, Use Cases, Developer
Jul 18, 2018

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If you’re a hardware hacker, or know a hardware hacker, you’ve no doubt heard of Hackaday.com. They always have super interesting content on hacks, projects, and you can even buy some cool boards, tools, and swag. But that’s not why I’m writing about them.

What may be less well-known is the other side of Hackaday: hackaday.io. Hackaday.io is where you can describe your cool hacking project—and I have found some astonishingly cool projects there!—and join in on contests. The contests are why I’m writing today.

The current round of contests is going to be awarding about $200,000 in prize money. That’s some serious cash! The current challenge is a Human-Computer Interface challenge:

Human - Computer Interface Challenge (ends August 27th) Your Challenge: Build an innovative interface for humans to talk to machines or machines to talk to humans, and show your project in action either controlling something or passing information from somewhere.

So what on earth does this have to do with InfluxData you ask? Well, hopefully a lot.

When you’re building a project, especially one like one for the Hackaday Prize, you need to collect data. Lots of data. How is your hardware performing? How are your users interacting with it? What’s working and what’s not working? How much power is your newly built board consuming? There’s just too much useful information to list. But collecting data is key to almost every digital endeavor these days.

So here’s my offer for any Hackaday.io Contest participants: I’ll help you get InfluxDB and the TICK Stack up and running to collect data on your project. I won’t even ask for a cut of the huge prize money you’re going to win because you used data to improve your design. I’m confident in making that offer because I know how dead-simple it is to set up and run InfluxDB. I’ll be following the contest closely to see what projects come up!