Building on IoT is intense. Every time you think of building something, you want to optimise it for precision, accuracy, form factor, and cost. There are hundreds of brands and types of sensors, displays, actuators, WiFi/cellular modules etc. You find them in the market, some off the shelf, some not, and each has its own configurations, sometimes even its own communication protocol. So you heavily depend on existing work that is similar to what you are working on.

In today’s era, you sift the online communities in search of guidance, in hope to find tutorials or articles describing the journey of building something related. Platforms like Hackster give you a wide range of communities for all kinds of advice. People can showcase their work here, which other people can build on later. Hardware communities inspire millions of developers all of the world.

Hardware communities are massive, connected and mature. But the hardware market is largely untapped and there are so little opportunities for makers in these communities.

We, at Grandeur, went through this journey ourselves and we believe that open source will be the backbone of next generation startups in hardware, much like the way open source changed internet and software companies for good. This is why we have decided to do something about it!

Today, we are proud to announce our Makers Program 🎉

The software world has this culture, especially on GitHub, where you can sponsor innovative and influential projects that make the life of other developers simpler. As a result f this, we see community-driven software frameworks like Vue, React and TensorFlow etc. booming today. They started with a single person working on a vision to ease development for other people, got sponsored by the people and even big companies that find the project extremely helpful and used that money to hire a team to extend the project and provide better support.

We think it's time the hardware world took a leaf out of software's book. Hackster is a community of 1M+ developers who regularly find answers to their questions in other people's work. If we could support the most noteworthy projects, incentivising engineers to build more and better, we can see potential of a similar growth here as well. The vision behind this program is to build a stronger community for IoT. We believe that this program will enable millions of entrepreneurs and inventors all over the world. And by that we are hoping we will kick start a new era of innovation in hardware.

This is our way of giving back to the IoT community we are proud to be a part of. The future of every community lies in capturing the passion, imagination, and resources of its people. And that's what we want to inspire.

Alone, we can do so little. Together, we can do so much. — Helen Keller

How to apply? 🚀

We are evaluating applications on rolling basis. Submit your proposal and and we will get back to you.

Who qualifies? 👥

Everyone! There is only one requirement: your intention is to document and open source your project. You will be expected to publish your development journey on Hackster.

What do we offer? 🔥

If you qualified for the program, you will get

• Micro grants 💵 + cloud credits. Enough to kick start a project.
• Technical and business mentorship.
• Marketing opportunties across our network.
• Exposure through our network. 🚀 We are connected with manufacturers, companies, investors and policy makers.

Who is running this program? 😌

MA is leading this program. He is one of the co-founders of Grandeur and owns developers relations. Grandeur is a venture funded US-based startup. We are the Heroku of IoT 🤖 and we are on mission to make IoT boring.