GSD Product Design Contest (Update)

After launching this contest in early June, we have had a signifigant number of entry submissions from both academic and industry. Just 2 weeks ago, we have held a training camp for the 9 teams who made it past the first round eliminations. Before we go into the details of the camp, let’s recap the contest objectives for this year:

The 2009 GSD Challenge

“Realizing the Robotics Dream”

Engineers, researchers, and educators have been using LabVIEW and CompactRIO to create robots such as autonomous vehicles, humanoid robots, fixed-base industrial robots, and personal/home service robots around the world. The fast development and prototyping capabilities, tight-integration to I/O, ruggedness, powerful embedded processing are all critical needs for many robotics applications. Being an open platform, CompactRIO has the capabilities to serve a wide variety of robotics applications through many readily available I/O modules and custom-designed modules.

The challenge this year is to design, prototype and deploy a Custom CompactRIO module solving a robotics application. Take this product from conception to finish and eventually market and sell this product in the marketplace.

Here's some info and pics and the camp we just ran a couple weekends ago. The agenda was mainly a Multisim/Ultiboard hands-on session, intro to LabVIEW FPGA, plus a few more talks about entrepreneurship from guest speakers with past start-up experiences.

You can check out our webpage here:

http://www.gsd-contest.com.tw/2009/titbits_list.php

Also, an online video:

Right now, these are the designs that the teams are committed to doing:

An I2C, SPI, and RS-485 interface module
A module with a embedded gyro compass
MEMS accelerometer module
Zigbee communication module
Navigation module for UAVs
Muscle signal acquisition module
Brain wave signal acquisition module
Maximum power tracking module for solar cell optimization
A module with a embedded CMOS camera

Let’s wish them the best of luck, because it’s going to be an intense and exciting showdown at the finals on 11.25.2009!

模組開發培訓營Day 1 精彩實錄

經過評審群們挑選後，終於挑選出九組團隊，晉級參加接下來的比賽。在 7/18 7/19 這兩天，主辦單位特別為這九組成員舉辦的技術培訓營。

現在就由照片帶領我們大家一起回到這兩天的時光吧！

身為評審群之一的 John，現身營隊，恭喜所有隊員，並和大家一起度過這兩天一夜的活動