Electromaker of the Month - October Winners

It's time to meet the winners of Electromaker of the Month for October! These three projects caught our judges' eye for their innovation and documentation!

In case you missed it - Electromaker of the Month celebrates the top three community projects (as picked by our independent judges) and rewards them with prototyping hardware from Nordic Semiconductor and some fine swag to boot! The top prize also receives a $50 Amazon gift voucher!

1. Artificial Sunrise Headboard With Voice Assistant And Coffee

First place goes to SECTOR_07 with this truly incredible-looking futuristic headboard that includes lighting, voice control, and it'll even make your coffee! The build is amazing, using kerf bending (a super precise wood bending technique) to create a curved, wraparound Arduino Mega-powered lighting system. The headboard also has some smart features too. SECTOR_07 used a text-to-speech service to create Prisma, a voice assistant, and thanks to a Mikroe SpeakUp Click board, you can talk back!

The video is more of a Science Fiction short than a build guide, but it's beautiful:

Our judges were impressed with just how polished this build looks and found the way the voice assistant was incorporated was an excellent way to simulate more complex voice assistants on low-powered hardware.

Congratulations SECTOR_07! You win the top Electromaker of the Month prize - a pile of Nordic Semiconductor prototyping gear! I just hope we can ship them to outer space, where I presume you live!

You'll also get some fancy Electromaker Swag and a $50 Amazon gift voucher!

2. Automatic Espresso with the Ndipatri Robogaggia

Second this month is nick-dipatri with a project to add some automation to his precious Gaggia espresso machine. In the Maker's own words "This project mods a popular espresso machine, The Gaggia, to automate many of its manual tasks. More importantly, when you're done, your espresso machine will look like Locutus of Borg!" They aren't wrong. That's a coffee machine with a hive mind if ever I saw one!

Our judges particularly liked the way this hack doesn't damage the regular usage of the espresso machine, particularly the way the scale fit's nicely into the drip tray! The write up is also fantastic, there's even a logic flow chart! Congrats on the second place, Nick!

3. Galdeano Handheld Computer

The third prize this month goes to angel-cabello with a wonderfully realized DIY handheld Python microcomputer. It looks like a calculator and acts like a graphing calculator thanks to LVGL graphics and the Eigenmath engine for calculations, but it can do even more! The feature list keeps growing, but thanks to the ESP32 module running the show, it's more than capable of acting s a portable Python programming machine, a text editor, and even a Phillips Hue bulb controller!  

Alongside the complexities of the hardware build, our judges were impressed with the software development that went into this project. the Eigenmath engine doesn't exist for ESP32. At least, it didn't before this project! The whole thing started as a desire to make a completely DIY computer keyboard using buttons and a microcontroller. Look at it now! Congratulations Angel! You take third this month!

Second and Third place wins a big bag of Nordic and Electromaker Swag, including an nrf52840 BLE dongle for creating custom Bluetooth Low Energy projects!

Will You Be the Next Electromaker of the Month?

Every month we celebrate the inventive, curious, and resourceful nature of our Maker community. Any project published on the Electromaker website is eligible to win, and there's a whole host of great prizes!

To get started, register for a free Electromaker account, and upload your project!