Element14’s Education Challenge – deadline March 15, 2011
“Ten hackerspaces around the world will be chosen to participate in the Great Global Hackerspace Challenge to create something cool and useful for education. Each of the ten spaces that complete their project will receive PCB layout software, and some nice soldering setups so that they can better teach how to make cool things with electronics. These ten hackerspaces will each get US$900 (or equivalent) and two months to finish their project. Three finalists will be chosen to show off their projects live (in person, or virtually) at the San Francisco Maker Faire in May. A panel of geeks will pick the one they think is coolest, and the winning space will win a handmade trophy and bragging rights, a top-of-the-line digital oscilloscope, and perhaps some other way cool stuff.
The money to make all this happen is being put up by element14, the new brand of Newark/Farnell (who sell electronic parts and tools) to market to us DIY types.”
http://www.tvbgone.com/downloads/hs_challenge/hs_challenge.htm
NASA’s Centennial Challenges – deadline ?
“NASA’s Centennial Challenges seeks to encourage the participation of U.S. based independent teams, individual inventors, student groups and private companies of all sizes in aerospace research and development through the offering of technology challenges with prize purses. Current competitions include; CAFE’s Green Flight – a high efficiency aircraft competition $1.65 M prize, Worcester Poly Institute’s Sample Return Robot – an autonomous robot retrieval competition $1.5M prize, Spaceward Foundation’s Power Beam – power transmission competition for space elevators $1.1M prize, Spaceward Foundation’s Strong Tether – high strength to weight ratio tethers for space elevators $2M prize, Night Rover – a power storage system competition for robot operations at night $1.5M prize, Nano-Sat Launcher – launch a 1 kg satellite into earth orbit twice in one week $2M prize.”
http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Centennial_Challenges
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/early_stage_innovation/centennial_challenges/index.html
HITB SECCONF 2011
Get your thinking caps on and prepare for the FIRST EVER HITB Hackerspace Challenge featuring LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0’s! Organized by the security team from ITQ, the Hackerspaces Challenge will be a team-to-team based competition with some serious prizes up for grabs! Each team of 2 will be given the same task: To build a LEGO Mindstorm from scratch and complete a predetermined challenge (to be revealed only on conference Day 1 (19th May) in the fastest time possible.
http://conference.hackinthebox.nl/hitbsecconf2011ams/?page_id=956
DARPA Adaptive Vehicle Make
DARPA, in the pursuit of innovative high-risk high-payoff tactical technology is looking to crowd-source the design and construction of the 3000-5000 parts that make up your run of the mill super advanced next generation military hardware. They are even going to distribute about a thousand 3D printers to schools, where students will compete to design some of the complex systems. The project emphasizes “not traditional” vendors (IE: Hackerspaces) and monetary compensation will be involved in the parts production process.
http://hackaday.com/2011/03/25/darpa-needs-your-help-design-a-ground-combat-vehicle/
http://www.darpa.mil/AVM.aspx
http://www.darpa.mil/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=2659
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Vehicle_Make
