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 joined this challenge.

Introduction:

Your home is your castle, and what’s better than a fully automatic castle? Nothing! That’s why we’re inviting you to submit your sweetest home automation hacks for a chance to win one of three $150 DigiKey shopping sprees.

We love playing around with home automation setups and have seen our fair share ranging from the simple “turn some lights on” to full-blown cyber-brains that learn and adapt to your habits. Where is your project on this continuum?  

Whether you’re focused on making your life easier, saving energy, gathering up all the data about your usage patterns, or simply stringing some random functions together and calling it a “system”, we’d like to see it. Nothing is too big or too small if it makes your home life easier.

Home is where the home automation is!

Honorable Mention Categories:

• Creature Comforts: Does your system make your house a home? Maybe it turns on and off the heaters to keep rooms just right, or maybe it turns on the nightlights when you’re heading downstairs for a midnight snack. The Creature Comforts category is for you.

• Efficiency: Automation isn’t just about convenience, but can help us save energy too. If your machines help you save money on your power and heating bills, show us!

• Rube Goldberg: A “system” sounds so formal, but a lot of ad hoc home automation projects are nonetheless super effective. If your home system grew organically and maybe resembles a collection of hacks more than a carefully orchestrated plan, it could be a Rube Goldberg setup.

• All the Data: An automatic home makes a lot of data along the way.  If you have a slick system for collecting or displaying it, or even just collecting it all, we’d love to see it.

• Retrofit: Not everything works like you’d want it to out of the box. Maybe you’ve hacked into an air purification system or hacked your washing machine to get it to play along with music. That’s a home automation retrofit.

Awards

Thanks to our partners DigiKey, three top projects will be awarded a $150 shopping spree.

Rules:

• Home automation projects must do something automatically in your home, apartment, or yurt. Other than that, anything goes.
• We want to learn from you. Document your project as well as you can so that we can follow along.

• All entrants must agree to have the design published on Hackaday.

• Employees and contractors of DigiKey, Supply Frame, Siemens, Arduino, and their immediate family members are ineligible to win but are still encouraged to enter.
• Rules and categories are subject to change and judges' decisions are final.

Examples:

Need some inspiration? Here are some projects to check out that should get your ideas flowing:

Check out some of the Home Automation-themed articles on Hackaday

• Hackaday’s own [Jonathan Bennett] wrote this great series about his forays into home automation that ended up with a computer in every room.
• [Anton] hacked an ESP32 into an off-the-shelf air purifier to bring it under his ultimate control.
• [Danilo] built his own control system for separate heat pumps to bring them all under central control.
• [Toni] retrofitted his blinds with MQTT-enabled motors on the cheap.
• [tmkThings] opens his front door with a custom NFC system.
• [Tijmen Schep] unified a dozen disparate devices, with style.
• [Matej Planisek] built this lovely e-ink screen and button box to keep him in control.