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Issue #203 June 2007
Technical Merit
by Steve Ciarcia
It’s no secret that Circuit Cellar is the place to go for design contests. We’ve hosted at least 20 big-name design contests in the last six years. Ever wonder why they come to us? It’s because all of you are so smart. Seriously, the concentration of active design talent at Circuit Cellar exists in very few other places. Combine a sharp readership with a magazine culture already tailored to showcase exceptional talent and it is an unbeatable recipe for success. That’s what we are all about and the sponsors know it.
Because these contests are frequently the launching pads for careers and products, they prompt a lot of queries. Typical questions include: who owns the design once you submit it (you always do), and can you use third-party commercial software in your design? (yes, as long as you document what you use). For the most part, simply referring to the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page of any current contest addresses the majority of issues.
One question I’ve been seeing more frequently will perhaps be added to the next FAQ. It concerns the judging criteria and specifically, “What type of factors do judges look at when they are determining ‘technical merit’ and ‘originality’”?
My first response is always to suggest that entrants look at the prize winners and the Distinctive Excellence designees posted on our web site from previous contests. The purpose isn’t to suggest they look at them to pick similar topics, but, instead, for them to note that it is the accuracy and clarity of the documentation that makes it easy for the judging team to better understand merit and originality.
The important thing to remember is that regardless of which company is sponsoring the contest and the specific technology required to qualify, the contest is truly about demonstrating good design engineering technique and that you have the expertise to incorporate that technology into product-quality examples. This is what the magazine is all about, and that’s what the sponsor looks for from our readership.
A contest write-up should, among other things, be an amalgamation of a functional spec and an implementation guide. The functional specification describes the product in terms of what it does, its external interfaces (including user interface), and performance levels. When you’re working in industry, this document becomes a kind of “contract” between you (the implementer) and the people describing to you what they want (marketing and/or upper management). The implementation guide describes the product in terms of how it’s implemented—the technologies used, the internal interfaces (including the hardware-software interface), and higher-level (more abstract) concepts about how the product works internally. This might include things like dataflow and state machine diagrams, pseudocode for the software, etc. This document is important when you (or anyone else) have to come back and support or enhance the product later. So again, put all the details in here that don’t appear in other places like the schematics and the source code.
By necessity a contest entry won’t include all of these things as separate documents, but it should touch on the relevant topics in order to rank higher in the judging. Also, a contest entry is usually in the form of a proof-of-concept, using evaluation boards and other items that would not be part of a real, salable product, so some of the topics will be necessarily incomplete. Still, becoming a top winner depends on your ability to convey a clear vision of how they would be accomplished to the judges. An extremely important part of this is having definite goals for the project and confirming whether or not you have met those goals.
The bottom line is this: we don’t care whether your project entry is a simple robotic device with two motors and a photocell, or a complete robotic vehicle for the Darpa Grand Challenge—if the documentation is good, it will be ranked higher by the judging team than the same project with poor documentation. Choosing a less grandiose application that can be completed and adequately documented is better than a pie-in-the-sky project idea that never gets finished.
Also, keep in mind that regardless of the number of prizes in any contest, and win or lose, all good project write-ups are also candidates for Circuit Cellar Distinctive Excellence awards (posted alongside the contest winners) and becoming feature articles in the magazine. Contest management at Circuit Cellar is all about rewarding good engineering technique, not just running a contest.
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