This contest has ended and the winners have been announced! Thank you all for participating!
Be sure to check out all the other amazing projects that were submitted!
Category: | Project: | Name: |
Undead Tech | 3-Axis Skull Mod for 12ft Skeleton | Nelson Bairos |
Haunted Smart House | Safety Coffin Grave Bell | Glen Akins |
Crazy Costume | Computer Head Costume | Skye Rutan-bedard |
Presenting Hackaday’s Halloween Hackfest!
Join Hackaday, Digi-Key, and our friends at Adafruit for a Halloween-themed contest! We want to see your crazy, creepy, ghostly, spooky, and awesome projects.
If costumes are your favorite part of Halloween, then why not dress up your outfit with some hacked upgrades? You could even design a ghoulish prop to add to your home’s Halloween decor or light up a Jack-o-lantern with LEDs. Whether it’s technical, artistic, or just plain terrifying, we want to see your projects!
Join us to check out the Halloween Show & Tell with Hackaday, Friday, October 29th at 1pm PT, to show off your awesome projects entered in the contest. Don't forget to also share your projects on social media and use the #HalloweenHackfest!
Hackaday and Digi-Key have partnered on this Halloween-themed contest to offer three winners an online shopping spree to the Digi-Key warehouse!
Awards
Thanks to our favorite partner Digi-Key, three projects, one from each category will be awarded a $150 shopping spree to Digi-Key. Winning projects that include an Adafruit board will win a bonus of having their prize doubled for a total of $300!
- Crazy Costume - Whether your project features moving parts, crazy effects, or enough LEDs to be seen from beyond the grave, the winner of this category will need to create the very best Halloween costume.
- Haunted Smart House - If you favor haunted houses, now’s your chance to create your own spooky props. To win this category you will need to create a chilling home modification project that’s worthy of scares. This could be a candy bowl that comes to life, a motion-activated project that startles unsuspecting houseguests, or just about any Halloween-themed home modification you can think of.
- Undead Tech - The winning project of this category will need to be the best and most technical Halloween-themed project. Whether you’re using modern tech or raising some undead tech from the past, just make sure your project is full of technology and well documented.
We're still on the lookout for the most artistic projects to be featured in the 2022 Digi-Key Calendar. Towards the end of the year, 12 visually stunning projects from our Digi-Key contests will be chosen to be featured in next year's calendar.
Artistic projects from the Earth Day Challenge, the Reinvented Retro Contest, Halloween Hackfest, and future 2021 contests will be chosen. These projects will score a $50 gift certificate to Tindie and have a chance to be selected as one of the 12 featured projects in the calendar.
Winners may also be asked to participate in the Adafruit Show & Tell if they would like.
Examples
Need some inspiration? Here are some projects to check out that should get your ideas flowing:
- Check out some of the Halloween-themed articles on Hackaday
- Project List: Halloween Hacks on Hackaday.io
- LED WiFi Hat by h3liosphan
- VoiceBox by TM
- Motion Sensing LED Jack-O-Lantern by Alpha Charlie
- Scare-O-Matic by MagicWolfi
- Tinker Tie Beta: RGB LED Bow Tie by Ariane Nazemi
How to Enter
Start a new project on Hackaday.io. Share images of your project and tell the story of how you designed and built it in the description of your project.
Once you have published your project, look in the right sidebar for the "Submit project to..." menu to enter it in Halloween Hackfest Contest:
Judging Criteria
Here are some criteria judges will have in mind while reviewing entries:
- Is your project relevant as a Halloween Hackfest project? (example: costume projects, haunted house prop, or technical project that embodies the spirit of Halloween.)
- How original is the project itself?
- Does the project page include good photos and/or a video of the project?
- Does the project have a bill of materials listed in the components section of the project?
- How detailed is the documentation?
Halloween Hackfest Contest Rules
- This contest runs from 9AM PDT Tuesday, August 10th, 2021 through 11:59PM PDT Thursday, October 28th, 2021 (here is a handy countdown timer), and projects must be submitted during this timeframe. Winners will be announced mid-November.
- Sharing schematics, source code, and/or design files are not required, but a huge plus. These will be considered during judging and are a big part of "backstory" and helping us understand your project.
- Existing projects or projects that were entered in previous Hackaday contests and did not win a prize are eligible for submission as entries in this challenge with the following restrictions:
- You must update your project page - judges will look at the date the project was updated.
- The project must have significant additions from when previously entered. Show what makes it unique for this contest.
- Winners can win only once but can enter as many times as they like.
- All entries will be judged by Hackaday staff.
- Hackaday Staff, Employees of Supplyframe, Judges, or the family of any of the preceding are not eligible to take part in this contest. Everyone is still encouraged to build awesome stuff and show it off.
Important Reminder: Previously created projects may be submitted to the contest, but they must be updated within the timeframe of this contest. Previously created projects submitted with no updates will be disqualified
To get started, start a project on hackaday.io and upload your project.
A big thanks to Joe Kim for the amazing art!