If you want to appear to have done a lot in a hardware hackathon, you need to do as little hardware as possible. Take a few preexisting modules and start writin

If you want to appear to have done a lot in a hardware hackathon, you need to do as little hardware as possible. Take a few preexisting modules and start writing software as soon as possible, because developing new electronics - even simple circuits - is hard and incredibly slow paced. Even once you've got 4 or 5 figures worth of lab equipment stacked up next to you, you're still going to be tearing your hair out because something isn't working like it should, and the tools available are very, very limited. I suppose it might be fun to spend a weekend combining a few of the cheap sensor chips available with an rPi to make a web-enabled sensor of some variety, but the scope for what you can do is so much smaller. The novel stuff will inevitably be in software. If you want to do something really interesting it will take weeks or months (and often years). Chips will die unexpectedly. That seemingly simple power supply circuit won't work. You'll short something out and the blue smoke will taunt you. It can easily take most of a day just to connect up a fairly simple prototype board. You can spend a week slowly building a wiring harness.