There is something happening at the moment which I am quite unsure about how to interpret it:
You are the third person I know of who says his project didn't win and thus "all the other projects" are not innovative, cheap, vapor ware, etc... Another guy I followed took all his projects and moved to his own blog because he didn't feel recognized enough and make any of the prizes.

I kind of agree with @Florian Festi on some points but I think your idea really is innovative. Didn't even see it until I had a look into the global feed. Maybe not the most efficient way of harvesting but hey, everything counts.

IMHO you should continue, but just if you do it for the cause! Green energy always is a good path to follow. Do your thing and be happy if someone comes along, grabs your idea and contacts you/collaborates with you.

My main reason I use hackaday.io is as a kind of project diary, even though I address the reader directly.

Good luck with your project, I'll keep an eye on it.

At first glance I kinda agree that the list of winners is not that great. But I wonder if it is reasonable to expect a good list. Energy is a core part of technology that has been explored for centuries and is still actively researched by well funded institutes. This leaves very little room for hackers to come up with something really remarkable. So most projects are either replicating some common piece of technology like putting a finished DC-DC converter into a housing or doing something that everyone else has ruled out as impractical and not worth pursuing. There may be a little room for true niches and true innovation. But most of the projects in this category probably don't qualify for this.

So may be it is not that surprising that the judges choose "works" over "sounds interesting" for this category. And may be we should have the wisdom to not expect miracles in a contest with such a difficult topic.

I think the reason why some people are upset is that there have been real problems with the judgment process in this challenge, where some projects have been chosen which have obvious flaws. And if you put much energy in your project and see that somebody who is not as innovative as you or just throwing around with buzzwords gets the recognition you think you deserve than you are upset. Most of the people can control that with reason (Project XY is better than my, the author deserves it), but if that is missing, your reason can not find something which explains why a project is chosen over yours, then you get the reactions you could see a lot the last weeks.

As I already said to Florian: I think I will do more research to find out how much energy a generator is able to harvest and decide based on that information if I want to continue to build a prototype :) I also should think about where you could use such a single harvester eg for camping etc.

Elliot Williams - though not one of the judges this year - has given some inisight on how decisions are made internally: https://hackaday.com/2018/07/24/twenty-power-harvesting-projects-headed-to-the-hackaday-prize-finals/

He's written a few comments. Worth a read!

OK, without going into the details of the Hackaday Prize:

If you are doing the project to win the Hackaday Prize you really should stop. Rather if this is your motivation you should probably not even have started. The Hackaday prize is just not there to motivate projects but to recognize them - and may be to motivate and promote good documentation.

Beside the possible issues with the selection of the winners there are a number of reasons that - in my eyes - disqualify your project from winning as it is right now. Not that I have any say in that.

The main issue is the last category: "How complete is the project?" Your project idea clearly is innovative. But there is a very thin line between an idea being innovative or just being wacky. So you have to demonstrate that you are on the right side of this line. So you do not only need some sort of prototype but one that actually works and has demonstrated qualities. Like charging a small battery over night or providing continues illumination at a reasonable wind speed.

To actually be considered for winning you probably need to find a niche where your project actually makes sense and is better than the boring, obvious options - like bringing the same weight in batteries or mounting a solar panel. May be it is for hikers who need to charge their stuff over night. Or sensors in a dark forest. Ask yourself the question: Would someone else build the same thing? And why?

I would really like to see this project continued but not for winning some prizes but because you are truly interested if it can be done - or even better: to solve a real world problem.

I had this idea floating in my mind for quite a while now, but the Prize gave me the motivation to sketch it down and do the research and first prototypes. But yeah the initial main motivation for me was to have some publicity for my freelance work. But currently I'm really curious about how much power can be harvested that way, so I think I will at least do that research and build some equipment for that.

And yeah, the incompletness was the main problem, as it turned out my prototype was 30min too late. They did a snapshot of the database and based judging on that. If I had the prototype out one hour earlier, I would had a chance, but that was my error in calculating timezones.

Would someone else build such a thing is a good question :) I only had thought about big scale applications for energy production not about usecases where somebody camping etc uses one of the harvesters.

So too sum it up: I think I want to find out how much energy is harvestable and then decide if it is worth it to build something which can harvest the energy.

Thank you for your input!