element14 announces Sixth Sense Design Challenge winners

The engineer community element14.com has announced the winners of its “Sixth Sense” Design Challenge. As one of five challenges the element14 Community runs each year, element14 encouraged its members to create a small, remotely-operated or autonomous vehicle, leveraging the processing capabilities of STMicroelectronics and TE Connectivity products to improve remote vehicle sensing and data collection.

The element14 Community team of judges selected a Grand Prize and Runner Up winner for the design challenge:

• Grand Prize – Douglas Wong, Canada – Wong created GraffitiBot, a fully autonomous ground vehicle capable of printing graphics on the surface it traverses and producing a liquid canvas drawing. Although the GraffitiBot itself might be small, the scope of the project was anything but, incorporating mechanical, electronics, software and hydraulic design.
• Runner Up – Rod B, UK – Rod B created a robot to help those working in construction by hauling heavy materials such as sand or gravel. To achieve this, he made his own PCB to host the TE Magnet sensor so that it would be board-mountable. This was his first ever element14 design challenge.

Through blog posts, the challengers made all of their build steps and code open source, so other element14 Community members can learn from these designs and replicate projects on their own.

“As the Development Distributor, we are committed to being a champion for makers and are proud to help drive innovation for our 600,000-plus member community,” said Dianne Kibbey, global head of community and social media for the element14 Community. “As always, we were very impressed by the creativity and innovative spirit our community demonstrated with this challenge and are looking forward to offering more opportunities for our members to push the boundaries of electronic design.”