2019 Hackaday Prize Begins Right Now

On April 3, 2019, the 2019 Hackaday Prize officially kicked offand it didn’t show up with a vague “build something cool” vibe. It showed up with a clipboard, a production mindset, and the gentle-but-firm reminder that your prototype is not a product until someone who isn’t you can use it without a troubleshooting TED Talk.

The big idea for 2019: take your hardware project across the finish line. Not just “it works on my bench,” but “it could exist in the real world without bursting into tears at the first shipping label.” If you’ve ever stared at a hand-wired prototype and thought, “Okay… but how would I make, test, assemble, and support 100 of these?”congrats. This year’s theme was basically built for you.

What Makes the 2019 Hackaday Prize Different

Past hardware contests often leaned hard into what you builtrobotics, sensors, power, space, you name it. The 2019 Hackaday Prize leaned into how you build: the messy, heroic journey from napkin sketch to something you can reproduce, document, and manufacture. That meant design for manufacturing (DFM), thoughtful user experience, realistic costs, and proof that your idea can live beyond your workbench.

From “It Works!” to “It Ships!”

A working prototype is a fantastic start. But product development asks tougher questions: Can it survive real use? Can it be assembled without a sorcerer? Can a stranger understand it in under five minutes? Can you document it so well that other makers (and future-you) don’t want to scream? The 2019 Hackaday Prize rewarded teams who treated those questions like featuresnot afterthoughts.

Prizes, Categories, and the Part Where Your Wallet Smiles

Let’s be honest: glory is great, but rent is also… persuasive. The 2019 Hackaday Prize put serious money behind the “build it better” mission, including a grand prize aimed at jump-starting real products.

• Best Product (Grand Prize): $125,000 plus a Supplyframe DesignLab residency in Pasadena, California.
• Five Category Prizes: $10,000 each (one winner per category).
• Five Honorable Mentions: $3,000 each (one per category).
• Community “Bootstrap” style funding: up to $500 each for the top 20 entries by community likes early in the contest.
• Total prize pool: about $200,000 on the line.

Translation: you didn’t need to be a VC-backed startup to be taken seriously. A small team (or solo builder) with great documentation, smart design choices, and a real-world plan could stand out.

The Five Focus Categories (AKA Your Product’s Report Card)

1) Concept: Be Original (But Also Useful)

“Concept” isn’t just “I attached a laser to a toaster.” It’s the clarity of the problem, the cleverness of the approach, and the reason your solution deserves to exist. Strong concepts usually do three things:

• Define a real pain point (bonus points if it affects more than three people and a very patient dog).
• Explain why existing solutions fall short.
• Show a plausible path from prototype to impact.

2) Design: Make It Make Sense to Humans

Great design is empathy with tools. It’s user needs, ergonomics, reliability, and the “oh wow, this feels obvious” factor. In 2019, that meant thinking about enclosures, interfaces, accessibility, and how the device fits into someone’s daily life. If your product requires a 12-step calibration ritual and a sacrifice of fresh solder smoke… maybe simplify.

3) Production: Can You Actually Build This Again?

Production is where dreams meet BOM spreadsheets. This category cared about reproducibility: materials, processes, assembly, sourcing, tolerances, test strategy, and scalability. A strong entry didn’t just show a working unitit showed how to make more units without chaos.

Practical signals of production readiness:

• A bill of materials that doesn’t depend on a discontinued part from 2007.
• Design choices that reduce hand-soldering and mystery wiring.
• A plan for programming, calibration, and testing at scale.
• Thoughtful mechanical design: fasteners, tolerances, cable management, serviceability.

4) Benchmark: Prove It Works (and That It Matters)

Benchmark is about impact and viability. You’re not just showing “it functions”; you’re proving “it performs.” That can include measurements, comparisons, cost estimates, and a clear discussion of competitors. If your project saves energy, show the numbers. If it improves accessibility, show the workflow difference. If it makes something cheaper, show the math (and do it before Twitter does it for you).

5) Communication: Tell the Story Like You Want It to Survive the Internet

Communication is the superpower of open hardware. The 2019 Hackaday Prize heavily rewarded documentation: logs, diagrams, photos, schematics, and clear writing. It also cared about “openness” and how well you completed the final requirements. In other words: you can’t win if your project page looks like a haunted folder named “final_final_reallyfinal.”

How the 2019 Contest Worked (Timeline You Can Actually Use)

The official rules defined two main stages: an Entry Round and a Final Round. The dates mattered, because hardware time is not like normal time. Hardware time is where a “quick enclosure tweak” becomes a three-week saga involving a caliper and existential dread.

Submission Requirements (The Stuff That Separates “Entry” from “Idea”)

The 2019 rules made one thing very clear: you weren’t entering with vibes. You were entering with documentation. During the Entry Round, you needed a proper project page describing the challenge, how your project solves it, and at least one image (sketch, schematic, renderingsomething). You also needed multiple project logs to show real progress, and you were expected to identify licenses and link repositories when applicable.

For the Final Round, the bar rose:

• A working prototype (not theoretical, not “my friend’s 3D printer is down”).
• A 2–5 minute video demonstrating the prototype and pitching the solution to non-technical viewers.
• High-resolution photos inside and out.
• More detailed logs (a real build story, not just “soldered stuff, it was fine”).
• A complete bill of materials for one unit.
• Complete schematics and documented I/O requirements and specifications.

What “Product Development” Looks Like in Real Entries

If you want proof that the 2019 Hackaday Prize wasn’t just about flashy demos, look at the kinds of projects that rose to the top. The finalists and winners covered everything from assistive tech to open hardware toolsyet they shared a common pattern: they were built like things meant to be used, repeated, improved, and shared.

Examples from the 2019 field

• FieldKit (Grand Prize / Best Product): a modular, open-source sensor system built for research in harsh environmentsdesigned for real-world deployment, not just lab glamour shots.
• DLT One – A Damn Linux Tablet! (Best Design): a repairable, upgradeable Linux-based tablet concept pushing back against locked-down consumer hardware.
• Axiom: 100+kW Motor Controller (Best Production): high-power motor control with an openness-first approach and serious engineering depth.
• Knobo (Best Benchmark): a USB Braille-learning peripheral focused on measurable, human-centered impact.
• SmallKat (Best Communication): a robotics platform that stood out not only for what it did, but for how clearly it was explained and shared.

Notice what’s missing from this list: “a cool idea with no plan.” The 2019 Hackaday Prize rewarded teams who shipped the story along with the hardware.

How To Build a Strong Hackaday Prize Entry (Without Losing Your Mind)

Start with a real user and a real constraint

The quickest route to a stronger product is to pick a user you can actually talk to. Interview one person who would use this. Then design around one constraint (cost, size, battery life, manufacturability, accessibility). Constraints are not enemies. They’re your project’s personal trainer.

Document like you’re teaching your past self

Project logs aren’t homeworkthey’re leverage. A good log answers: what changed, why it changed, what broke, what you learned, and what’s next. Include photos, diagrams, and short “here’s the trick” notes. Future-you will thank you. So will judges.

Plan for manufacturing early (even if you’re not manufacturing yet)

You don’t have to build 10,000 units to think like someone who could. Start asking: What parts are risky? What’s the assembly time? What’s the test plan? How will you program or calibrate each unit? What can you replace with a more available component? DFM is basically “kindness to your future supply chain.”

Make your BOM honest

An honest bill of materials doesn’t just list parts. It considers alternates, lead times, and “oops” costs (connectors, fasteners, cables, enclosure material, shipping, and the five prototypes you will sacrifice to the gods of iteration).

Your video is a demo and a pitchkeep it simple

A 2–5 minute video sounds easy until you try to film a device that blinks in Morse code while you narrate. Keep it clean:

1. Problem: 15 seconds.
2. Solution overview: 30–45 seconds.
3. Demo: 1–2 minutes.
4. How it works (high-level): 30–45 seconds.
5. What’s next: manufacturing plan, costs, and impact: 30 seconds.

Getting Early Momentum (Likes Without the Ick)

The early community funding angle (up to $500 for top liked projects early on) made momentum valuable, but the best strategy wasn’t begging. It was clarity. Makers like projects they can understand in 60 seconds.

• Put your best diagram near the top of the page.
• Write a one-paragraph “what it is and why it matters.”
• Post short, frequent updates instead of one huge update nobody can parse.
• Ask specific questions to the community (parts sourcing, enclosure strategy, testing approach).

Conclusion: Build Like You Mean It

The 2019 Hackaday Prize was a love letter to the part of engineering nobody puts on a sticker: the grind from concept to manufacturable reality. It celebrated the builders who iterate in public, document their choices, and treat constraints as design fuel.

If you’ve got a project that deserves to exist outside your workshop, the lesson of 2019 is simple: start now, share early, and keep going until your prototype stops being “a cool hack” and becomes “a thing people can use.”

Maker Notes: of Battle-Tested Contest Experience

If you’ve ever entered a hardware contest (or even just promised yourself you’d “document this one properly”), you already know the first emotional beat: wild optimism. You have an idea, a parts order, and a dangerously confident spreadsheet. Then reality arrives wearing a trench coat made of missed deliveries and “why is the polarity like that” moments.

The best contest experience I’ve seen makers describeespecially in the Hackaday Prize ecosystemis realizing that the project page isn’t a marketing page. It’s a living lab notebook that strangers can read. When you treat it that way, something surprising happens: you stop hiding the ugly parts. You post the failed PCB rev. You admit the enclosure didn’t fit. You write down the weird bug that only appears when the moon is in a certain phase and your USB cable is slightly judgmental.

And that honesty isn’t a weaknessit’s a magnet. People can help you when they understand the problem. A vague “not working” update is a dead end. A specific log like “buck converter squeals under load; here’s the scope trace; here’s the layout; here’s what I tried” is basically an invitation for the internet’s nicest power nerd to appear and save your weekend.

The 2019 product-development focus made this even more obvious. You could watch projects level up when builders started thinking about the parts that don’t feel “fun” at first: test points, connectors, assembly steps, serviceability, and the dreaded bill of materials. The moment you write a real BOM, your project stops being fantasy hardware and becomes a thing with gravity. You notice that the cheapest component is the one you can buy next week, not the one that exists only in a 2016 forum post. You notice that ten different screw types are not a personality trait. You notice that your wiring harness looks like spaghetti because you accidentally designed a pasta-based product.

Then comes the video. Almost everyone underestimates the video. The trick isn’t cinematic quality; it’s narrative discipline. Two minutes is short. Five minutes is still short. You don’t have time to explain every clever circuit flourish, so you learn to lead with the user and the outcome. “Here’s the problem. Here’s what my device changes. Here’s proof.” Once you can do that, you’ve gained a skill that’s useful far beyond any contest: you can communicate engineering to humans who don’t collect oscilloscopes for fun.

Finally, there’s the quiet win: you end the contest with a project that’s better than the one you started witheven if you don’t take home a prize. You have cleaner documentation, clearer design choices, and a stronger plan for iteration. In a product-focused year like 2019, that’s the point. The prize money is the spark. The real reward is becoming the kind of builder who can take an idea to production without losing your joy (or your eyebrows).