element14 Names Winners of Upcycle It Design Challenge

element14, an electronic design community, has announced winners of its ‘Upcycle it’ design challenge.  Sponsored by Intel, element14 challenged 15 community members to upcycle an unwanted or waste product to give it a new or enhanced lease of life.

The application areas for this challenge and ability to use unlimited components to complete an original electronics-based project offered design freedom.

The top three entries are the following:

• Grand Prize Winner Carmelito Andrade from the United States upcycled a mirrored clock into a functional household IoT Hub, using the Intel Edison.  The clock provides an update on the weather, temperature and traffic, as well as presents new emails and the news from social media.  Fabrication techniques used included 3D printing.
• Runner-Up Jason Wier, also from the United States, upcycled the APC AP9211, a Power Distribution Unit (PDU) produced in 1999 into a functional modern IoT Power Distribution Unit.  He used the Intel Edison to host a custom, responsive web interface, which controls the PDU relays from a wireless, handheld device.  The unit also communicated with his home hub to manage temperature and lights and displayed graphs of the captured data.
• Third Place Winner Gerrit Polder from the Netherlands upcycled Electromatic’s Impulszähler EZK impulse counter into a web scraping value display device. He used the Intel Edison to find and display time, date, temperature, humidity and pressure, scrape and display blog ‘views’ and ‘likes’ and make the display speak with a connected wireless Bluetooth speaker.

Entries were judged on originality, innovation and technical merit by a panel of judges including experts from Intel and element14.  The winners posted blogs and videos during the competition.

For more info, visit element14.

Sources: Press materials received from the company.