It took a while because we had to validate our selection, but we finally have a judgement for the click board design competition.
The competition yielded a total of 17 designs. After careful deliberation, we are ready to present the winners.
3d place
Instead of giving the third place prize to a particular design, we decided to reward Jerry Farmer, for his outstanding effort. Jerry contributed the majority of designs and our whole campaign would've been a lot less noteworthy if it wasn't for him.
Jerry gets a compiler license of his choice, a matching clicker 2 board, and an hour of hardware design consulting from Upverter.
2nd place
Biometrics are a growing field and sensors in that area are garnering more and more interest. We recently released a Heartrate click, but one of the competitors beat us to it.
Kamrul Hussain wins second place with a heart rate monitor based on a sensor from Analog devices -- he calls his design Micro Heart.
Kamrul gets a compiler license of choice, an "Easy" board of choice, a design review from Upverter Engineers, as well as an hour of hardware design consulting over phone or Skype.
And now, start the drum roll as we get to our winner.
1st place
One of the criteria for judging the design was this: Is there a novelty factor to your design and the technology it’s based on?
The winning design not only implemented a novel and exciting technology, but also utilized it in an original way. It's based on Microchip's MGC3130 Gesture controller, the same one that's on our Gesture board, but with a twist.
The GesT board implements the gesture controller on the constrained mikroBUS™ form factor, giving out a very small sensing surface. True, it perhaps doesn't utilize the controller's full potential, but sometimes less is more. The compact design would make it cost-effective and more compatible for combining with other click boards and implementing into a final design (at the same time it can be used as a standalone gadget with a proper adapter). Plus it doubles as a 5-key touchpad.
The designer, Christian Herrera from Columbia, will get a compiler license of his choice, an "Easy" board of choice, a clicker 2 board of choice, a selection of our click shields, a one year Upverter standard account, an hour of consulting with Upverter engineers via phone/Skype... and, his design is on our pipeline.
Eventually, we will design, manufacture and market his click board, and he will receive five pieces of it.
***
That wraps things up. We’d like to thank each and every one of you who participated. This was no random sweepstakes and it took effort on your side to get familiar with requirements of mikroBUS™, to figure out an idea, and finally to go through with designing it. We hope you got something out of it, even if you didn’t end up in our final selection. We are also grateful for your patience in announcing the winners.
Until next time,
Yours sincerely,
MikroElektronika