ESP8266 MicroPython Contest

I received information from Espressif Systems about their involvement in the contest. Unfortunately, due to a large amount of work on the new ESP32, their engineers don't have the time to look at this contest, and, as consequence, there will probably be no prizes from them.

With those sad news, I can now officially proclaim the contest finished. I'm sorry for the long wait.

I have carefully analyzed all of the qualified projects, and I'm ready to announce the winners of the main prize (the OpenMV camera board) and the prizes sponsored by Adafruit Industries (the five Adafruit HUZZAH Feather boards). The prizes sponsored by Espressif Systems (five ESP32 chips) will be announced separately, when I hear from them.

• The first Feather goes to the author of #EncoderLib. It's a simple yet useful device, and there is some new MicroPython code written for it, so that everybody benefit. I wonder if you could make a controller for Arkanoid or Pong with it!
• The second Feather goes to the authors of #Home automation: thermostat with ESP8266 & OpenHab. While at the moment it's just a proof of concept, a lot of work went into researching and implementing this. There has also been quite some testing of the MQTT library.
• The third Feather goes to the author of the #ESP8266 Geiger counter. You never know when you will need one of these!
• The fourth Feather goes to the author of #NASA Wind Decoder. This is a real hacker project, with a lot of details and information, but also entertaining to read. He also uses a fork of MicroPython that has an I2C slave -- perhaps with enough testing this will get eventually merged back into the main branch.
• The fifth Feather goes to the author who submitted three projects, #DHT12 AM2320 Nokia 5110, #Nokia 5110 Conway's Game of Life and #ESP8266 Useless Throwie, covering all bases: a serious project with a library, a "game", and an amusing hack, which seems simple, but which in fact took quite some work and research to make. I wish I had more Feathers to give.
• Finally, the OpenMV goes to the author of #Traffic Signal LED Matrix Display. Not only a great hack, not only very well documented, not only contains a library for reading PNG images, but also has blinking lights! How can a project with blinking lights *not* be the winner?

Congratulations to all the winners (incidentally, everyone who submitted a project that qualified won something, isn't that great), and please contact me here with a private message about how and where I am to send the prize. Big thanks to everyone who participated and of course to the sponsors, without who we would only have a single prize.

After carefully inspecting all of the submitted projects, I conclude that the following projects meet the criteria for this contest (thats is, include an ESP8266 with MicroPython running on it). The list is in no particular order.

• #NASA Wind Decoder
• #ESP8266 Useless Throwie
• #ESP8266 Geiger counter
• #DHT12 AM2320 Nokia 5110
• #Nokia 5110 Conway's Game of Life
• #Traffic Signal LED Matrix Display
• #EncoderLib
• #Home automation: thermostat with ESP8266 & OpenHab

For the remaining projects either had nothing to do whatsoever with the ESP8266, or used different firmware than MicroPython. They are still great projects, and I'm sure at least for some of them there simply wasn't enough time to write even the beta version of software, but rules are rules.

Thank you everyone for your great projects!

The contest is now officially over. The judging now begins. I'm going to pick the winner of the OpenMV camera and the 5 HUZZAH boards, and Espressif is going to pick the winners of the ESP32 chips. Unfortunately I can't give you any hard dates for this (especially the Espressif part), but all the information I have will be posted in updates here.

We have now 17 different projects, and from the first glance at them, at least 15 of them qualify. There is a big chance that about half of them will receive prizes, so the future looks bright! Once the finalists are announced, I will contact each of them through private messaging here on Hackaday.io to arrange all the details.

If you didn't enter your project yet, you still have about 4 hours to do it!

Espressif (the company that makes ESP8266, if you were wondering) is going to sponsor even more prizes for this contest! They promised to give 5 ESP32 chips. Now I wish I could participate myself.

Thanks to the generosity of Adafruit Industries, the contest now has more prizes. We will have 5 Adafruit HUZZAH Feather boards to give away. They will go to the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth best projects.