Contest showcases potential of wireless 802.11

Lantronix has named the winners of its annual wireless design contest.

Lantronix has named the winners of its annual wireless design contest.

The contest challenges engineers, students and hobbyists worldwide to stretch their imaginations and come up with creative implementations of the Lantronix WiPort 802.11b/g embedded device server in order to wirelessly network-enable an electronic device.

With more prize money and three new categories, this year's contest generated nearly 200 innovative design entries.

Editors from Electronic Design and Machine Design, and Lantronix engineers judged each entry on technical merit, originality, usefulness, cost-effectiveness and design optimisation.

In addition to their prize money, the winners received an expenses-paid trip to the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, where they were honoured at an awards ceremony.

"As a leader in 802.11 wireless M2M solutions, Lantronix is continually driving to accelerate the innovation and adoption of wireless device networking", said Chris Preston, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Lantronix.

"The Lantronix wireless design contest showcases the incredible breadth of possibilities provided by wireless 802.11 and highlights the ease of integration found with our all-in-one WiPort embedded device server module".

"We are excited about the tremendous response that this year's contest received".

"We'd like to thank everyone who entered, extend our congratulations to the winners who travelled from around the globe and look forward to another great event next year".

First place, and US $6000, was awarded to Damien Hubaux and his engineering team from Cetic in Belgium.

The SAND (Smart Adaptable Network Device) System is a small, autonomous and flexible embedded system based on a "soft processor" implemented in FPGA logic.

The SAND solution is currently being used by Key Driving Competences, a Belgian truck company, to acquire objective data about its driver's behaviour in order to train workers and decrease fuel consumption.

"The WiPort proved to be an excellent choice for our component-based design approach", said Damien Hubaux, Leader of the Embedded Systems Engineering Group at Cetic.

"Lantronix WiPort was very easy to implement and perfectly integrated into the SAND, our FPGA-based embedded platform".

"The Lantronix WiPort allowed us to very quickly build solutions for our industrial partners".

Second place, and US $4000, was awarded to Kevin Hubbard, from Washington.

The Wi-Fi Clock is a fully functional alarm clock with Internet access.

User's customised weather, news and email can be automatically downloaded from the Internet to a Wi-Fi-enabled room using Lantronix WiPort.

The alarm buzzer may be configured to beep on incoming emails and sound an alarm on a specified emergency.

The snooze bar rapidly toggles between display pages making it an innovative design for end users to retrieve real-time information.

Third place, and US $2000, was awarded to Mohamad Abou El-Nasr, Assistant Professor at the Arab Academy for Science and Technology in Egypt.

His Wi-Aquarium allows users to remotely control and monitor their aquarium anytime from anywhere in the world.

Users can monitor the fish via a camera, feed the fish, adjust the heater, turns the lights on and off and control the filter.

The device can even send an email to the user with updated status ensuring an optimum aquarium environment and healthy fish.

The best entry from a student and/or educational institution, and US $4000, was awarded to Michael Schuchardt from Michigan Technological University for his Home Dashboard design.

This device retrieves user-specified information from an Internet server and displays it in a customised, user-defined format.

Examples of such information include weather forecasts, stock information etc.

The best 802.11 b/g and Ethernet-swappable combination (pin-compatible Ethernet and wireless solutions) for US $2000 was awarded to Christian Herzog from Software Technologies Group in Illinois.

His design enables a direct connection to 802.15.4 and Zigbee networks in a totally wireless environment - all without the need to wire gateways to each other.

What used to be done through an Ethernet connection can now be done wirelessly, which reduces costs by eliminating expensive cable runs.

The lowest power usage prize for $1000 was awarded to Shahar Seifer, PhD from Israel for his Geophone Array System.

This system wirelessly acquires information from several buried geophones to form a complete underground picture in order to detect underground structures.

This is ideal for applications such as land security and archaeological sites.

Seifer's design uses the Lantronix WiPort to make it easier to install geophones without connecting wires to the processing computer or to an additional power supply.

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