Name the Thing Contest – 96

Thanks to Parallax for sponsoring the contest this week. They will be providing a Boe-Bot Robot Kit – USB Version to the winner. "The Boe-Bot Robot is built on a high-quality brushed aluminum chassis that provides a sturdy platform for the continuous rotation servo motors and BASIC Stamp’s USB Board of Education. Many mounting holes and slots may be used to add custom robotic equipment or off-the-shelf Parallax add-ons." This contest will run for one week (July 25 – 31, 2009) . Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item pictured above and give an example of what can be done with it. Please note that a winner outside the USA will need to pay for the shipping.

Please do not give the answer in the comments. 

Send an email to contest @ hackedgadgets.com with "Name the Thing Contest" as the subject, and the message body consisting of:

  • The name of the item in the above picture
  • An example of what the item pictured above can be used for

The winner will be chosen at random from all of the correct entries.

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Added Aug 10, 2009

The item to guess was the guts of a smoke alarm

The winner is Alex O. (There were 277 entries)

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Below is a picture of the the prize product.

19 Comments


  1. If I were to ever win one this would be it, I hope. If I don’t I may have to break down and buy/build a programmer of my own.


  2. Do us Canadians also have to pay for shipping? 🙂
    BTW I have that EXACT PCB!


  3. Yay! Something I know 😀


  4. lol, great page its from. Should get posted after the contest 😀


  5. Super simple, this one. Tons of entries, and I bet about 99% of them are correct.


  6. I knew instantly what it was… and less than a minute of Googling to find the exact image used here. I agree there may be 300+ correct entries. Oh well, still FAR better than your odds at the lottery, eh?


  7. Hi VintagePC,

    I think that us Canadians would have to pay for the shipping of the kit. Either that or send them a program that will allow it to covertly drive itself from the shipping facility to your house. Just purchase some GPS hardware a solar charging system and some extra memory to store all the way points and you should be good to go. 🙂


  8. Woah awesome prize.


  9. This is the first time I’ve seen a prize for this guessing game I actually want, a shame everyone knows what the object is including me!


  10. I kept looking at it and thinking, “I’ve seen this before…” It wasn’t until I noticed a certain little something that it finally clicked, and gave it away.


  11. What did that cast iron tool end up being? I was going to guess a channel cutter, but I couldn’t find anything similar online.


  12. I have done programming and development for a micro mouse competition before. I’m telling ya, these little robots are a lot of fun to work with. Ours was a custom robot though, but it was a similar two wheeler like the Boe Bot. We rigged ours with ultrasonic sensors to navigate a maze.


  13. Just wondering, can you enter more than once?


  14. You can send updates or changes to an entry, but you can’t (or at least shouldn’t) enter more than once.


  15. The competition was run through my university as part of a final year project. The conditions were that if the robot was did not successfully solve the maze, your group failed the course. So there wasn’t much in terms of second chances…


  16. Hi Yon,

    As Mike mentioned this contest can only be entered once.


  17. My daughter would locve this prize – she has been asking to build a robot for a while now.


  18. These things can save you life and all (how boring,) but what’s REALLY fun to do with them is when the battery is getting low and it makes a quick short beep every five minutes, you take it in to work and hide it near a co-worker’s desk… it’ will drive ’em NUTS!, and they can’t locate it ’cause the beep is so short (make sure they have a good sense of humor before you do it – or not.)

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