Priority Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia The Most Success Yet

I love it when a good plan comes together—a great sponsor, plenty of interest, and superlative results. That’s exactly how I’d describe our latest Atmel AVR design contest. In fact, this contest has the distinction of being Circuit Cellar’s most successful contest yet. No doubt you’ll agree when you review the most noteworthy projects.

Notice I didn’t just say "winning projects." Getting a positive result from submitting a project to our contests has very little to do with the legalese in the contest rules that describes the numerical odds of winning. The real profit for anyone submitting a project is the potential publicity and celebrity that comes from having your entry chosen to be posted or published by Circuit Cellar and Atmel as a significant engineering design example. The distinction is that this resume-building exposure can’t be purchased. It has to be earned, and that’s what makes it unique.

Sifting through the contest projects is not an easy task. Paid professionals do the actual judging, specifically because there is a lot of money on the line and contestants expect that we do it right. Judges are given the responsibility of deciding project relevance in 20% divisions of technical merit, originality, usefulness, cost-effectiveness, and design optimization. I’ve never been comfortable doing that kind of judging myself. I prefer my tried-and-true "gut scrutiny" approach. Basically, I know when I read a good manuscript or see a good project. I don’t have to overanalyze why or explain it to anyone else. I guess that means I can own a magazine, but I better forget being a contest judge.

The good news is that we both get to do our things in these contests. The judges get to pick the official winners, and I get to talk to a lot more entrants (the unofficial winners) about posting and publishing opportunities. The net result is that many dozens of entrants are involved in the process, not just a few top-prize winners. Circuit Cellar’s motive in administering contests isn’t just about distributing prize money for sponsors. It’s about cultivating the abundance of engineering talent attracted to contests. Today’s contest participant is tomorrow’s author.

As you might have guessed, deciding which projects deserve to be published is more difficult when we have a very successful contest, but I still enjoy the challenge. As I write this, the Atmel AVR 2004 Design Contest winners haven’t been chosen yet, but I’ve already started generating my list of projects that will be named Distinctive Merit. I’m just glad I don’t have to decide a pecking order because some of these projects are truly unique (in my completely biased and warped opinion).

For example, one entry is the Traffic Data Display. This tablet-sized device is configured with 512 bicolor LEDs organized as a lighted map of the L.A. freeway system. It’s meant to be used in public service vehicles, buses, emergency response vehicles, cabs, etc. to provide a real-time display of traffic conditions and tie-ups. The LED display matrix, which receives an ASCII message of map position coordinates via an alphanumeric pager with FLEX protocol, signifies specific road conditions by color and frequency.

This time around I give the cinematographic highlights award to an industrious cribbage player from Stanford University. The entry called The Wedding Board is about the construction of an electronic cribbage board, but it also includes a movie about the construction techniques that borders on the quality of something typically presented at the Cannes Film Festival. I certainly applaud such inventiveness. Of course, a short video on how to play cribbage wouldn’t have hurt either.

In the category of who’s explaining this one to Atmel when they read the project title on the list I send at the contest conclusion?, we have the SIR Sucks A Lot project. I know you guys like making me squirm when I try to tell sponsors that not all of my readers are completely off-the-wall. For this project, I will explain that it’s an autonomous robot that collects rice in a floor layout resembling the average living room. The robot was designed to compete in a household robot vacuum cleaner competition, where the goal was to pick up as much rice as possible in 4 min. Be kind, guys. Atmel is OK, but some sponsors don’t have a sense of humor. ;-)

The list goes on and on. We have a ’Net radio receiver, a 32-channel R/C servo controller, a wireless model rocket launch control system, a differential scanning calorimeter, a wireless telemetry system for a Formula 1 race car, a data encryption device, a septic tank level monitor, and more. Rest assured, I will have my work cut out for me triaging the Atmel contest list.