Global competition gives opportunity to develop applications for flexible and open IoT gateway

RS Components announced the winners of the Hackster community design contest based on the SIMATIC IOT2020 industrial IoT gateway, following the official closing of the global competition at the end of May. The contest was aimed at engineers, makers and students and challenged them to come up with innovative applications and solutions based on the open and highly flexible IoT gateway, which is manufactured by Siemens. Sponsored by RS and others, including Tektronix, Weller and Massimo Banzi, the co-founder of Arduino, the total value of prizes for the contest is more than US$7500 with a first prize of US$4800. Five winning design ideas – from more than 80 initial submissions received from across the globe – have been selected by Peter Oakes of thebreadboardca YouTube channel, the initiator of the competition who is also a leading engineer and programmer, together with RS and Massimo Banzi of Arduino. Divided into two phases, the first part of the contest ran through February in which entrants had to submit their initial concept idea for a potential industrial IoT or home automation application based around the IOT2020. The second phase began in March and involved participants fleshing out their initial concepts to offer a more detailed design, including information such as wiring diagrams, programming and descriptions and/or videos of the build-up of their end application. Heiko Luckhaupt, industry sector marketing manager at RS, said: “The competition saw an exceptionally wide range of highly innovative ideas including monitoring-based systems for use in the local environment, which should clearly demonstrate the flexibility and functionality of the IOT2020. Although the device is mainly targeted at students, makers and geeks, we also believe this Hackster community contest has shown the potential for real deployment of the product in industrial and home automation applications.”