Instrumentation Monthly Test | Measurement | Control
RS Components (RS) has announced the winners of the Hackster community design contest based on the SIMATIC IOT2020 industrial IoT (Internet of Things) gateway, following the official closing of the global competition at the end of May. The contest was aimed at engineers, makers and students and challenged them to come up with innovative applications and solutions based on the open and highly flexible IoT gateway, which is manufactured by Siemens.
Sponsored by RS and others, including Tektronix, Weller and Massimo Banzi, the co-founder of Arduino, the total value of prizes for the contest is more than $7,500 with a first prize of $4,800. Five winning design ideas – from more than 80 initial submissions received from across the globe – have been selected by Peter Oakes of thebreadboardca YouTube channel, the initiator of the competition who is also a leading engineer and programmer, together with RS and Massimo Banzi of Arduino.
The winning design came from Belgium and was for a rolling material monitoring system that can sit inside a bulldozer and collect data from the vehicle. Using a commercial narrowband network, SigFox in this particular project, the design can monitor operation of the machine and send diagnostic data to users, potentially enabling preventive maintenance on machines being used at construction sites. Second prize in the contest came from India and was awarded for an IOT2020 based industrial boiler controller design, which demonstrated the flexibility of the IOT2020 platform in an industrial application. A key element of this highly imaginative project was the use of gravity and a water pump in place of a fuel pump, and a flow sensor as a steam turbine. The three runners-up submissions were designs for an automatic pond filler, a safety assistant for an industrial control system, and an energy-monitoring gateway.
