And the Maker Month DragonBoard Contest Winner Is...

Friday 6/17/16 09:49am
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Posted By Ketal Gandhi
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Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.

Q: What has 17,000 heads and came up with 777 cool ways to use the DragonBoard™ 410c during Maker Month?

A: You! Our DragonBoard developer community.

Throughout the month of March, you submitted 777 answers to the question, “What would you make with a DragonBoard 410c?” then more than 17,000 of you voted on the cool ideas that came in. We sent a DragonBoard 410c to the 30 top developers with the ideas that received the most votes. Those winners created short videos showcasing how they used their DragonBoard 410c, and our panel of judges awarded the grand prize of $5,000 to the coolest of the cool ideas.

Building up the community and IoT

The results of the contest were much more impressive than we’d anticipated.
First, we already knew you were a creative bunch, but some of you really raised the bar:

  • Lab on a Chip – To instantly test for foodborne pathogens using spectroscopy, microfluidics and engineered enzymes
  • Intelligent Baby Strollers – To control fold-up and brakes and to send real-time updates to parents’ smartphones
  • Microcontroller Gardening – To automate a hydroponic indoor garden and connect it for monitoring over the internet
  • Airplane Tracker – To capture actual location and estimated arrival time of planes in flight using a software-defined radio, GPS and Bluetooth
  • Sign-in/Sign-out – To expedite registration for school activities
  • National Cold Cuts Day – To design the best sandwich recipe based on what’s in the refrigerator, and order anything needed
  • Pothole Scanner – To map the potholes of Rome with cameras attached to an automobile chassis
  • Dragon Detector – To detect motion, snap a photo, scan the image and sound an alarm in case the subject happens to be a dragon
  • Dog Entertainment – To chase or run away from a stay-at-home pet that needs consistent attention and stimulation

We received 768 other ideas that were all over the map like these. I used to say that you can’t make this stuff up, but obviously, YOU can!

Your creativity told us a lot about the breadth of potential applications for DragonBoard 410c and the geo-diversity of the community we’re building through the Qualcomm Developer Network. Ideas came from all over the globe, and the 31 finalists represented Colombia, France, Germany, India, Netherlands, Romania, UK, and USA.

And the winner is . . .

Our judges selected the VIsion-Based Drone Autonomy project designed and built by Akash Dhamasia of Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. Akash’s idea was to take a drone and add on-board video processing from the DragonBoard 410c so that it can determine its location and navigate itself when GPS is not available. He envisioned indoor autonomous flight for applications like 3D-modeling, rescue operations and surveillance.

Here’s the video Akash submitted:

He wrote in his accompanying essay, “We have implemented drone navigation using vision with the DragonBoard 410c in simulation. The DragonBoard is mounted on the drone along with a camera, such that the DragonBoard takes input from the camera and calculates its local position using a mean-shift computer vision algorithm.

“In our scenario, we took the image from the DragonBoard 410c as our reference and calculated the drift of the drone from that reference. With the drift in x and y, we were able to successfully command the drone autopilot connected to the DragonBoard to navigate to the given location. Due to the ease of programming offered by Linaro [the flavor of Linux running on the DragonBoard] and fast processing by the board, we were able to efficiently calculate the local position of the drone in real time.”

Our judge Glenn Carlson of Arrow Electronics, makers of the DragonBoard 410c, said, "We were very impressed with the creativity and detail in these DragonBoard 410c-based projects. The autonomous drone was my favorite due to its great utilization of the various technologies on the DragonBoard 410c. It clearly demonstrates the Snapdragon processing power, the geolocation technology and the image processing ease provided by the Linaro software stack. Arrow was happy to be a part of this contest and provide the technologies needed to make these projects come to life."

David Mandala of Linaro, another judge, favored projects that combined work on both hardware and software: “I really liked the Drone Autonomy demo and look forward to seeing what comes of it. I also liked the Dragon Detector, Smart Camera and Object Tracking projects because they were focused on recognizing or sensing something, reacting to it and taking an action.”

Akash wins the grand prize of $5000.

Next Steps

IoT is a big part of where Qualcomm Technologies is going, and the Maker Month contest has been a watershed event on that path. We’re also expanding our efforts in the maker community through our recent participation at Maker Faire Bay Area.

And for you makers out there, we’ve started a Projects page on the QDN website. If you’ve created a project using the DragonBoard 410c and would like us to feature it, visit the page and let us know what you’ve built. We’re always looking for ways to continue building up the DragonBoard community, so if you haven’t started developing on the DragonBoard 410c, visit Arrow Electronics and pick one up today.

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