element14 has announced the winners of its ‘One Meter of Pi’ design challenge.
Members of the element14 Community were asked to create a high-tech, sustainable farm within one square meter, or about 10-11 square feet.
To help participants succeed, element14 teamed up with Raspberry Pi to provide 20 applicants with a kit featuring a Raspberry Pi 4 2GB single board computer along with multiple Pi accessories, including the Pimoroni PIM487 Automation Hat, PIM486 Enviro Hat, and the Pico HAT Hacker PC.
After 20+ weeks of designing, researching, prototyping, coding, and testing, with 94 blog posts and 46 videos created, the Grand Prize was awarded to Bruno Santos from Portugal who integrated Twitter, time-lapse videos, and the Raspberry Pi camera to create an effective hydroponic garden, which resulted in one of the most fruitful setups seen in the challenge.
The Runner-Up, Milos Rasic from Serbia, created an impressive multidisciplinary project, featuring a Nanny robot arm with 3D printed parts to tend to plants within an enclosure, interchangeable tooling and a robot for watering the plants; all controlled elegantly with a GUI and powered by Raspberry Pi.
Other participants in the design challenge who produced impressive results included:
· Ambrogio Galbusera, from Italy, who created a self-contained room with plants on all surfaces that featured a high-pressure spray system.
· Jakub Duchniewicz, from Poland, who created an under bed grow solution, built to take advantage of wasted space and included basic environmental monitoring.
· Ian Stephenson, UK, created a novel method of watering that pressurised and atomised the water source in the bottom of the container and equally distributed water across the multiple levels of the grow enclosure.
· Ujjval Rathod, Germany, used MQTT and an ESP8266 to make wireless sensors, and a grow enclosure with controlled RGB grow lights.
To see all of the winning designs, and learn more about the element14 Community, visit: element14.com/1- enc meter-of-pi-winners.
