MAKE held a Raspberry Pi Design competition with MCM Electronics for US-based Pi owners, and have just released the results. I’m not sure what’s more impressive: the outstanding quality of the entries, or the fact that even though we spend much of the day furiously googling for new Pi projects, many of the submissions were new to us here at the Foundation. It’s great for us to watch other organisations running contests like this: not least because it’s a real relief not to have to judge them ourselves!
The Grand Prize went to Intonarumori, a collection of magic sound boxes made by a hacker/art collective called urbanSTEW. The STEW-folk say:
Intonarumori is a series of interactive sound boxes created by an art/tech collective, urbanSTEW. The project is based on a century-old futurist movement in which noise-generating machines were created. Inspired by this, urbanSTEW built six new noise machines, each equipped with a Raspberry Pi and various sensors/controls. The boxes are self contained and only need to be plugged in. Intonarumori was presented at a creativity festival where they were played by over 2,000 children/adults.
The Sunlight Foundation’s Lobbyist Meter won the Artistic category: we tweeted about this a while back (and it’s been in my “things to blog” folder for a while) because we thought it was a clever, snarky, funny way to bring attention to a very serious issue. You can read more about the Lobbyist Meter on the Sunlight Foundation’s website. Here it is, doing its transparent, democratic thing.
The Education category award went to a project you’ll all have seen before, if you’re regular readers: Emma Bennett’s beautiful school State Board project (which we have been using in talks as a demonstration of some of the very cool stuff we see kids doing with the Pi) won the prize. Read more about it in the post we wrote when we first saw Emma’s work, and see some video of the board in action below.
Everybody in our offices secretly wants a wooden case for their Pi, because we are all impractical, and we have all read Idoru. The Enclosures category was won by Chris Crumpacker for this beautiful piece of hand-tooled walnut. Chris, if you’re reading, please get in touch. We absolutely, positively need one of these to hold one of the Pis at Raspberry Towers.
Chris told MAKE:
Some times all you need is a bit of scrap wood for inspiration. I had some walnut left over from a previous project. I just love the look of walnut. I had seen other wood cases but they where always 6 pieces of wood glued or nailed together to make a box. I wanted it to be one hunk of wood and my intentions were to carve out a home for the Raspberry Pi.
The final category, Utility, was won by another project we’ve featured here: David Bryan’s cat feeder, which I enjoyed blogging about because it gave me the opportunity to use the phrase “liver-flavoured kibbles”.
Congratulations to all the winners, and thanks to MAKE and MCM for running the competition. You can see the other entries on MAKE’s website – enjoy!
