When should I send my contest entry to Circuit Cellar?

Before the deadline, obviously. Seriously speaking, you’ll want to send your entry with plenty of time to make it, especially if it’s coming from a long distance. In past contests, we have received some entries as much as a month before the deadline. Most, of course, show up on the last day or so. Will your entry be disqualified if you FedEx it the day before the deadline and there is a tornado that shuts down air traffic coming into Connecticut for 3 days? No. As a practical matter, a contest has to have rules. As long as we recognize that the contest entrant has made a good-faith effort in following those rules, we will make a similar good-faith effort in interpreting them.

How do I put together an entry that will impress the judges?

Circuit Cellar only administers the contest. Except under special circumstances, we aren't involved in the actual judging. However, we can relate some of our observations and experiences from past contests as a means of giving you an idea of how to answer this question.

For the most part, following the rules is the best way to impress a judge. They don’t like searching for the key ingredients in your entry. They always seem to appreciate organization and presentation depth. We’re not telling you to submit your contest entry as a magazine article manuscript, but the organized format of a technical article is a good template for describing your project to the judges. In the past, the entries that contained depth and description seemed to score best.

Are there other opportunities besides the contest prizes?

That’s up to you. Circuit Cellar sponsors these contests so we can find good design projects to publish in Circuit Cellar and Circuit Cellar Online. Your contest entry contains typically 90% of the work necessary in creating that article already. It is normal practice for us to approach many contest entrants (after the winners are announced) about publishing their projects. Winning a prize in the contest is not related to publishing your project. Circuit Cellar’s criteria for picking which projects to publish is just deciding which ones will interest Circuit Cellar readers. Don’t worry, our editorial staff will help in the preparation of your article if you don’t think of yourself as a professional author. Of course, you will certainly be able to count yourself among that group when your project is published and you are paid for the article.

Submission Guidelines Overview see rules for complete entry requirements:

• Abstracts may be submitted in Microsoft Word or or ASCII text.

• Block Diagrams for hardcopy submissions may be supplied as a printout from any drawing package. If an EPS file can be created from your program please send the file as well as the hardcopy. Hand drawn diagrams are also acceptable if they are legible and precise.

• Block Diagrams for digital submissions may be supplied in PDF or TIF formats as well as EPS.

Can I use a 3rd party commercial board or an Atmel development system for the Design Logic 2001 contest?

Technically speaking, any design that uses an Atmel brand AVR, FPGA, or FPSLIC device is eligible. Let's face it, this contest is about Atmel components used in various applications. It is not necessarily about proving that you have unique new ways to wire an AVR or FPGA in a circuit or that you soldered it together yourself. The real focus of this contest is the uniqueness of your application and the software written to execute it on an Atmel product. The judges, however, will probably be more impressed if the commercial source of your project's "brains" was de-emphasized and the project application and software was emphasized. The easiest way to de-emphasize that you are using an Atmel development system or other commercial board in a project entry is to redraw the entry schematic to contain only the hardware circuitry necessary for the project. That tells the judges that, although you used a commercial board for convenience, you did it only for that reason and not because you wouldn't know how to configure the proper Atmel-component circuit. The picture submitted with your abstract should contain your actual hardware, even if this is a commercial development system.