Fun designs feature in element14 awards

One single board computer called out for its reliability was the Raspberry Pi, which is a key component of this year’s Best Design Challenge Project.

“Every year, our community blows us away with what they’re able to achieve, by combining their creativity and intelligence with Premier Farnell products, to come up with something completely original,” said Dianne Kibbey, Global Head of Community and Social Media for element14.com and Premier Farnell. “Our community is always encouraging and supporting each other to keep pushing and creating new and interesting designs, and these awards are a true reflection of that. We’re so happy to be able offer a platform for our over 600,000-strong community to collaborate and can’t wait to see what they come up with in 2019.”

The top designs and most helpful contributors are featured in five winning categories: Member of the Year, Roadtester of the Year, Best Design Challenge Project of the Year, element14 Presents Video Project of the Year and Project14 Theme of the Year.

The winners of the element14 2018 Community Awards are:

• Member of the Year – Dixon Selvan – Selvan is a first-time Community Awards winner. He competed in the Design for a Cause challenge, submitted several RoadTest reviews, and contributed multiple projects to the monthly Project14 competitions. Selvan is a frequent contributor and integral member of the element14 Community.

• RoadTester of the Year – Gough Lui – Lui is this year’s top roadtester thanks to his extremely thorough review of a high-end Rohde & Schwarz oscilloscope that not only shared its benefits and capabilities with the community, but also helped to discover some minor software improvements. By taking the time to complete such a comprehensive roadtest, Lui helped the community get a better understanding of the product, and also helped make it better for future use.

• Best Design Challenge Project of the Year – Smart Range Hood by James O’Gorman – O’Gorman created a 5-star design with his impressive smart range hood that used custom sheet metal, 3D printed enclosures, and an interactive app to control the fan, touchscreen display and even a custom “Summon Husband” button. This project showed an array of skills, from design and coding, to 3D printing and PCB design. O’Gorman thoroughly documented his fails as well as his victories, sharing important insights into the design and build process.

• element14 Presents Video Project of the Year – Andy West’s Game Genie – West made vintage Atari fans’ dreams come true with his innovative “Game Geenie” for the Atari 2600 game system. Using FPGA, West created a way for players of the beloved classic video game to manipulate their games to make things easier (or harder), and even access content that wasn’t included in the proper release of the game.

• Project14 Theme of the Year – A new award for 2018, Robots with Wheels was the community’s favorite theme in 2018. Project14 hosts monthly project competitions around a specific theme, and by spurring on such fun designs like the 3D-printed CupRobot, RoboBobLet and even a real-life R2D2, it’s not hard to see why this theme was the community’s favourite.