March 25th is Arduino Day 2023! What Should We Do for Our Annual Arduino Project Competition?

Yes, even using bare AVRs rather than entire Arduino. Develop it on an 8 bit Arduino, then shrink it to a 14 or 8 pin AVR.

Seems a bit simplistic. It is a contest. Maybe specify it must be reactive, not just patterns of blinking LEDs.

How about an escape room prop? A phone, touchtone or dial, that must have a specific number dialed to hear a recorded message. Or a series of button presses, switches, and things plugged in in the correct order (or unplugged) to accomplish a task like launching a rocket or disarming a bomb.

Or something else.

Reactive would be cool, but there are a lot of ways to blink an LED.

It can have quite a scope if you look at doing something interesting with a group of LEDs, a string, matrix, or cube, or whatever, of LEDs.

It's also possible to build something that can blink an LED from a button cell battery for the longest number of days/weeks/months.

One could also use a group of dev boards, synchronized in some way to all blink simultaneously. That would take a fair bit of trickery. I'm also thinking something synchronized like that could be built along the lines of those drone light displays.

LEDs could blink to send messages, maybe like Morse code, that get picked up by another board.

Persistence of vision is essentially LEDs blinking at just the right time as they spin around.

Or creative projects using leds ? 

Library of Babel perhaps ?

ah, there you are...

https://libraryofbabel.info/

How about a call home challenge?

E14 Community controlled Arduino call home. Members assemble a kit to make the call using an Arduino. I'm not sure what home would be.

I confess this would be a stretch for me. I would love to participate but the few arduino I have are limited in comms. I think I have one the has more smarts that was given to me for a challenge I didn't participate in. Hummm....where would that be.

Wow. Really? A downvote? How odd.

Do not worry about downvote. Here on Element14 very few members use downvotes and in most cases downvote happens when user want to upvote on mobile and nearby tiny button is clicked instead. You idea looks good. I think it is this case. I added you upvote for neutralizing it.

I love the idea of making something that serves to play and have fun.