Thursday, February 20, 2014: The event was organised to encourage hobbyists, students, professional design engineers, etc, to design and create innovative applications in the field of embedded systems using the Sakura board
Renesas Electronics recently organised a nationwide contest called the ‘GR Sakura Design Contest India 2013’ for embedded systems engineers and hobbyists to design innovative projects based on the Gadget Renesas (GR) Sakura board. The event was held in partnership with EFY Enterprises Pvt Ltd and Element 14.
While Army Institute of Technology, Pune, bagged the first prize for its ‘magic glove’ hand gesture hardware controller, Marwadi Education Foundation, Rajkot, got the second prize for its Sakura smart SOS system (or S4) for vehicle crash detection and emergency responses. IEEE Kolkata got the third prize for an advanced home signal warning system for train protection.
The event was organised to encourage hobbyists, students, professional design engineers, academicians, professionals and young engineers to design and create innovative applications in the field of embedded systems using the Sakura board, which is an open source compatible development board, while also being entirely compatible with the Arduino programming language (using Renesas Online Compiler as the programming platform).
GR Sakura, manufactured by Gadget Renesas, is a compact board that has a tiny but powerful microcontroller embedded in it — the 32-bit RX made by Renesas. GR offers a variety of development environments, including simple programming using a smartphone, making it easy for anyone to create a program. By simply connecting some input devices like sensors that check out the surroundings, detecting things like light, sound and distance, with output devices such as LEDs, speakers and motors, the Sakura board can be used to create cool gadgets!
An overview of the contest
The contest began in May 2013 with a call for abstracts and received a good response, with about 580 registrations. Entries were received from leading technical institutes like the NITs, IITs, Anna University and Delhi Technological University, as well as noted companies like Honeywell, TCS, Bosch, etc. Many small design houses also submitted their abstracts for innovative designs.
Amongst these, the top 100 abstracts were provided the GR Sakura board for actual development and were given a time period of three months to complete their projects. After a series of evaluations, Renesas invited the top 20 contestants to showcase their projects and compete for the first three slots at the grand finale held on December 3, 2013.
Selected contestants submitted the complete documentation, source code, schematics, and videos of their working projects to compete for the top three positions.
Akihiro Matsuyama, leader of the GR project, kept the contestants enthralled with the latest GR devices from Japan. Sunil Dhar, general manager, Renesas Electronics Singapore Pte Ltd, expressed his vision for Renesas India. Some of the other distinguished guests who graced the occasion included Ramesh Chopra from the EFY Group, Ravi Pagar of Element 14 and Rajiv Batra of Rabyte.
Apart from the top three positions, prizes were also awarded in other categories such as the best open source project, the most innovative project and the most active team on the forum. The first five entries for the contest also received a prize of Rs 3000 each as a motivation for participation.
