Many artists are inseparably associated with their medium: Vincent Van Gogh had oil paint, Auguste Rodin had bronze, and Banksy has the spraycan and stencil. You have ICs, passives, wire, and solder. So often electronics are hidden away, but not today! We want to see you build electronic circuits that are beautiful in and of themselves.
This is Hackaday’s Circuit Sculpture Contest and we bet you already have everything you need to enter. Leave behind the drab flatland of 2D PCBs and break out into the third dimension! Or break away from the PCB entirely. Our inspiration comes from a few recently featured projects by Mohit Bhoite and by Eirik Brandal that show functional electronic circuits supported by their own wiring:
There’s something beautiful in these works. They take what would be unnoticed traces and bring them to the forefront of the project. The core of the challenge is simple: built a sculpture where an electronic circuit is the main building material (or medium if you prefer the artistic vernacular).
Head over to Hackaday.io and publish a project page that shows off your circuit sculpture — enter using the “Submit Project To:” dropdown on the left sidebar of your project page.
There are no strict requirements for what information you share but here’s some advice on wooing the judges: We want to see what you went through during the project. Show off your planning, the method you used to fabricate it, share a schematic if you can. Tell the story like you would if standing around the workshop with your best friend.
Full contest rules are available on the contest page.
Even if that’s just lighting up an LED, your sculpture must also be a functional circuit. Judges will primarily consider the art of your creation, but will also take into consideration the complexity of this circuit. But this really isn’t about who wins. Beautify is in the eye of the beholder, and we’ve see a lot of ugly projects that are unmistakably beautiful!
We’re looking for projects that get away from traditional circuit board layout and make something beautiful from the components and the connections themselves. The most obvious is flywire sculptures like the ones above, but we think projects that involve circuit boards could still do well in this contest — think Cordwood or other methods where the PCBs aren’t the center of attention or constrained to one plane. We also think Manhattan-style, and dead-bug style builds can be a thing of beauty, so these will be considered as well.
The point is, push the boundaries of your creativity! Components and wire are cheap, so test out your ideas, iterate on your successful tests, and I be you’ll surprise yourself with what you can accomplish. What you see above is the result of the same first steps. This is Hackaday; we want to see those tentative first steps as much as we do the finished products because great ideas come from so many places. Good luck!
The Circuit Sculpture Contest
Source: HackADay
