This year’s Hackaday Superconference was our biggest yet! With a massive Hackaday Prize on the line, a larger Tindie meetup, and more attendees than ever, it was an incredible gathering of like-minded hackers and hardware enthusiasts.
There’s a lot to recap for those who weren’t able to make it this year, so let’s dive right in!
FieldKit Takes Home The Hackaday Prize 2019
First and foremost, we have to congratulate the FieldKit team for winning the grand prize this year: a sum of $125,000 to be exact. FieldKit itself is an open-source modular sensor system for conducting critical research in harsh environments.
You can check out all the other category winners here, but we would be remiss to not mention SmallKat, which took home $10,000 for winning the “Best Communication” category. It also just so happens to be a Tindie product, but who’s counting?
Yes! It's from @tindie. https://t.co/kqfrjAaq0l
— Straithe (@Straithe) November 17, 2019
Tindarians Take The Stage at Supercon 2019
We had more than a few Tindie friends on stage this year. You can check out their talks online as well if you weren’t able to attend in person. While not all of the talks are online as of this writing, you can stay tuned to the Hackaday YouTube channel.
In the meantime, these are the ones we recommend:
- TwinkleTwinkie – PCB Art is Pain
- Chris Gammel – Gaining RF Knowledge: An Analog Engineer Dives into RF Circuits
- Jeremy Cook – Building Strandbeests: Impossible, to Working Bots
- Mitch Altman – The Pros and Cons of Tech Can We Design Tech that Serves Humanity?
- Emily Velasco – Why You Should Create Ugly, Weird, and Annoying Things
Several more Tindarians also presented over at the Supplyframe DesignLab stage. They were recorded but need to be edited before the videos can be published. Be sure to check out their talks when the recordings go up on Hackaday’s YouTube!
What’s in the Bag?
Those who attended the Hackaday Superconference this year found something a little more substantial than the usual conference swag. This year, we partnered with multiple Tindie sellers to offer hardware that you can find right here on Tindie.
Here’s a shot of what I got in my bag, courtesy of TwinkleTwinkie:
We would like to extend an extra special thank you once again to the Tindie sellers who helped make Tindie Surprise possible:
- ARK Electronics ⚡LiPow
- @arturo182 ⚡Serpente
- @BBenchoff ⚡Mr Robot Badge
- Duppa @FattoreSaimon ⚡I2CEncoder V2.1
- Geppetto Electronics @nwsayer ⚡USB µISP
- Nerfhammer @highenergybeams ⚡Is it me or is it USB?
- RFC2795 Ltd @ZxSpectROM ⚡RC2014 Micro Kit
- Tall Dog @_loglow ⚡Teensy & TinyFPGA breakout boards
- @MrTwinkleTwink ⚡Shitty-Add-On PCB Art
A Tindie Panel, Meetup, and a Swap Meet
During the conference, we also had an amazing Tindie panel, hosted by our own Jasmine Brackett, which offered some excellent insight into the challenges that sellers face when they try to get their products out into the world.
After the panel came the Tindie Meetup, which this year featured a hardware swap! Here are some highlights from the event:
Bitluni stopped by to drop off some of his ESP32 VGA Shields:
So blinky! ⚡#supercon @tindie pic.twitter.com/ml809gfUl8
— Colleen Carroll @ Supercon (@colleeninboots) November 17, 2019
Alex Glow brought a whole bunch of boards people were excited about:
Even Hackaday’s Editor in Chief, Mike Szczys took notice of the turnout:
The first annual @tindie swap meet is a hit! Grab the cool stuff from your parts bin and make some trades… I'm sure this will be back again at the next #supercon. pic.twitter.com/mcT0nyb4Z1
— Mike Szczys (@szczys) November 17, 2019
All-in-all, this year’s supercon hosted over 40 Tindie sellers and a massive number of people from the broader community. Thank you to Hackaday, Supplyframe, the Tindie crew, and to all of the amazing people in our community for another awesome supercon!
See you all next year!