Dangerous Prototypes

Today we announce the winners of the Energy Micro EFM32 dev-boards.  There were lots of great ideas, thanks for your submissions.

Congratulations to David, his idea for a subsurface stream water level monitoring and logging system scored him the EFM32 Gecko development kit:

Subsurface stream water level monitoring and logging system. (Ecologically friendly hydrological data collection) Particularly for studying subsurface stream behaviour in caves here in Kentucky. (Especially caves connected to the Mammoth Cave system. This cave system has >300 miles of passages and 5 different underground rivers and their many feeder streams. ) This type of instrument has to be packed in several miles underground through tight passages and set up for unattended operation lasting many months. There is no sunlight available for solar powering the logger and data must be hand collected on return trips since low power radio does not penetrate rock very well.

Noel won an EFM starter kit for his idea:

This looks like a nice dev board. Since this is a low power device, I think it would nice if I power it with solar modules. I have a few more of solar modules and this could be a great charge controller. I hate storing batteries and then after a few months, it’s voltage becomes so low that it doesn’t work with my charger anymore. This looks perfect as a solar battery charger controller.

If I have one of these, I will first create tutorials on how to use it from the simple blinky let to interfacing with LCD, SPI devices…etc, and then use it to control individual charging of a huge row of AA batteries.

The controller should monitor each AA cell individually and implement a deltaV/ deltaT monitoring loop to precisely control the charging of each cell.

In this way, I can just leave it beside the window and let it continuously trickle charge all my batteries.

Eric also won a starter kit for his idea:

This would be great for my smart car project. I have a 2001 VW Golf modified to run on Bio Diesel. I would love to use this to do everything from monitoring/averaging fuel consumption, tire pressure, break temp, fluid temps, maybe tie it into the odb2 port and get some engine readings, and probably do something cool regarding the starter (maybe a pin entry or rfid verification) or throw a remote starter on it so it can warm up the fuel, so it is thin enough to be injected into the engine, before I leave the house in the morning (Chicago winters are brutally cold). Looks like this will handle everything I can throw at it.

Thank you to Energy Micro for the free swag.

Thank you for participating, there we a bunch of great ideas.