Embedded design contest winners announced

Recognising the growing engineering talent for the Internet of Things (IoT), semiconductor supplier Renesas held its first Gadget Renesas (GR) embedded design contest in Southeast Asia this year. The result was the GR PEACH Design Contest 2017 in ASEAN.

Established in 2012, the Gadget Renesas contest was organised to showcase the creation of innovative and futuristic IoT designs by students, hobbyists and professional engineers using a GR board. The inaugural Southeast Asian contest challenged participants to base their designs around the GR-PEACH development board, based on Renesas’s powerful RZ-A1H microprocessor.

The GR-PEACH.

On 21 November, almost nine months after registration opened, the top 10 contestants (six from Vietnam, three from Singapore and one from Thailand) were invited to attend the grand final of the competition, held on 21 November in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Among the 10 finalists, six were students.

The judging panel chose Trong Nghia Nguyen from HCMC University of Technology Vietnam as this year’s winner for his project ‘Autonomous Robot for Indoor Surveillance and Monitoring’. Nguyen’s autonomous robot was notable for three main features: its ability to locate its position and run across the building; gathering sensor data from the area that it passes through; and processing that data and sending only crucial or abnormal information to the cloud, which can only be accessed by the administrator.

According to the judges, the winning project made good use of the high-precision position control (±1 cm) system on the GR-PEACH using ultrasonic waves underground and in buildings without GPS signal. It leveraged the GR-PEACH platform’s high-performance capabilities and could be controlled in real time. The panel believes the project contributes to high-precision position control development in Southeast Asia.

“Gadget Renesas is a community-driven project and the contests are also a constant feedback to develop a better, cost-effective and feature-rich prototyping board to the market,” said Akihiro Matsuyama, leader of the Gadget Renesas project. “The inaugural contest in ASEAN has been a success, thanks to the contestants’ unique approaches to using the GR PEACH board to create next-generation IoT applications.”

Top image: The GR PEACH Design Contest winners.