The Last contest ROCKED! New Mp3car sponsored contest?

The Chatpad contest rocked.

We're going to write a detailed blog post on the results later, but in brief we had about a dozen members donate money for a cash prize to encourage open source development around a piece of hardware. The community got a great open source software product and the wining developer decided to donate the cash to a charity for sick children.

By all accounts, it was a big success. Thanks to the donors, testers, and developers who worked on this.

What other ideas can we help ignite?

• We have a new LCD here we could do something with.
• We're probably going to get some of this swag from Parrot (swag 1, swag 2)
• Pelagicore is also going to have some of their hardware available.

Do we have any other fun contest ideas that would provide a benefit to a large portion of the community?

i think the pico lcd is awesome. i will likely use it in a few htpc's and radio boomboxes.

for our cars though, i would love to see a cheap display-button package. basically, 4 or 5 small lcd's in a row side by side make up one larger display like the pico lcd. they could matrix video together through software to show track, artist info, rss feeds, even full motion video.

then, when needed, the screens could show independant controls, and you could push those screens like a physical button to control what you want.

if we could find good cheap lcd's i would think the hardware side of things would be fairly easy, but getting the software right would be the challenge. the possibilities would be endless though. if an easy button editor program could be made, you could theoretically have a whole new user-made skin database of all the different button and screensaver setups.

How about a contest to get the Chatpad working with a wireless xbox controller using the wireless gaming receiver. A lot of of already have Xbox 360s and don't want to have to buy another controller just to be able to use the chatpad on a pc. I'm willing to pitch in a few dollars to get a new contest started.