The 2018 Hackaday Prize Robotics Module Challenge has come to a close, and the winners have been decided. There were some truly incredible projects on display and plenty of Tindie sellers who offered their own designs!
You can find a full list of the finalists here. Join us as we take a look at the Tindarians who are among the winners, and a few of the incredible projects that were part of this year’s robotics challenge.
Tindie Seller Robotics Module Challenge Winners
This year had not one, but two Tindarians win the round! They are joined by eighteen other winners who all had amazing contributions to the world of robotics.
PCB Stepper Motor
Our first winner and Tindie seller is bobricius with the PCB Stepper Motor, a project inspired by a separate Hackaday project, showing how the community is able to build upon the work of others to reach even greater heights.
Like the project that inspired it, Bobricius created a motor that has the stator coils etched into the base PCB, but this new project has eight stator coils and offers a larger motor. The 3D-printed motor of the original has also been switched out for a rotor made of stacked PCBs with cutouts for 5-mm neodymium magnets.
This is the second entry bobricius has made in The Hackaday 2018 Prize. His previous project was the not-a-Nixie-tube display.
Bobricius is rather prolific on Tindie with not just one, but two stores. PeMi Technology opened in 2013 and is where you can find a variety of compact and useful products that cover everything from charging lithium batteries to USB supercapacitor LED earrings. Last year, Kits for Kids launched with a range of learn-to-solder kits featuring rockets, fire engines and more.
HEXABITZ – Modular Electronics for REAL
Our second Tindie seller and one of the twenty winners in the Robotics Module Challenge is HEXABITZ. This is a project and product on Tindie that we’ve previously covered on our blog. Hexabitz is a project composed of six-sided modules that can be soldered together into assemblies that allow for complex 3D assemblies.
The modular design offers a huge amount of scalability with 30+ modules in a single assembly with inter-module functionality and a built-in Command Line Interface (CLI) that removes the need to write code before starting your project.
Several alpha modules are already for sale on the Hexabitz store on Tindie. This unique way of prototyping electronics removes much of the issues and efforts associated with spinning your own boards during the prototyping process.
Check out Hackaday.io for a deeper look into this project that stands among the winners of this year’s Robotics Module Challenge.
Honorable Mentions
While these projects from the Tindie community didn’t make it into the list of winners, their ideas are inspiring nonetheless! Here are some of our favorite projects that were entered into the Robotics Module Challenge:
- Smart Motor Driver for Robotics – From 2B Robots
- NomadStep: Modular Motor Controllers – From West Side Electronics
- xLIDAR – From J.Rodrigo
The Power Harvesting Challenge is already underway. If you haven’t entered, what are you waiting for? Enter your best ideas into the challenge for a chance to be one of the winners in our next roundup!
