The 2022 Hackaday Prize challenge is underway which means there are plenty of wonderful innovations to check out, made by the clever and creative contestants. This year the Hackaday Prize has been aptly focussed on helping the planet and the second challenge in this year's series is all about reusing material that would otherwise go to landfill.
The projects for this round were required to either be made largely of recycled materials or be designed to help in the reuse of other materials. This presented the judges with a broad range of innovations and the final ten chosen are all really cool in different ways.
There was a fair focus on plastics which definitely makes sense given the recyclable challenge. Reusing plastics rather than disposing them is a key theme which is good to see. Kickstarter is always cropping up with 3D printing innovations to help print faster, or save on filament, so it's no surprise Hackaday had a few of these like-minded entries too.
To this end there were a few projects specifically targeting 3D printing, including one way to make jewellery and sheets out of scrap and this 3D printer that simply uses trash plastic to print.
Other neat innovations included this Plastic Scanner which is being developed to be able to tell plastics apart. This would make being able to recycle plastics appropriately much easier on a grand scale, which would be great to see. Then we can do a sick jump over the rest of the landfill we plan to one day eliminate on one of these recycled plastic skateboard decks.
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There were also some developments that are pretty cool when it comes specifically to PCs. One person, fed up with the constant death of laptops used in the technology department of the school they work at, designed a new form of PC from the wreckages. These units have been redesigned to be better suited to their role at the school, and make use of potential e-waste to boot.
Another very cool project is the Pew Pew LCD. This is a small card sized handheld device reminiscent of a Gameboy that's designed to help people learn Python on a featherlight device. It looks like a simple purpose built device with a lot of neat potential. Plus, it's super duper cute.
There are plenty of great projects in the Hackaday challenge and likely more to come. All the finalists from this around will get $500 for making it this far. It won't be until November that we'll find out which finalist from all the challenges will take home the $50,000 grand prize.
