2023 saw Community members experiment with high-quality products to produce boundary-pushing designs
element14, an Avnet community, continued to challenge and inspire its members throughout 2023 by hosting dozens of design challenges and educational opportunities, providing the opportunity for the global community to experiment with new technology, generate environmentally-friendly projects and express their creativity.
“Our design challenges are meant to inspire creativity and innovation, and based on the unique projects we received this year, they did just that and more,” said Phil Hutchinson, Senior Programs Manager at element14 Community. “Our members generated everything from bee identification gadgets to help the planet, to little free library tech upgrades to encourage a love of reading, all while experimenting with top products and learning about new technology solutions.”
Below are a few stand-out projects from the 2023 design challenges:
- Save the Bees Design Challenge: Participants were encouraged to generate projects to protect bees by using hardware and technology. Members were buzzing with great ideas and inventions, including a remote node to identify bees, a pollinator monitoring system using Raspberry Pi, a remote node LoRa WAN connected IoT Bee Monitor which collected data on a mocked up bee hive, and a low power remote Bee Monitoring platform.
- Little Free STEM Library Design Challenge: element14 and Hackster inspired their communities of makers, designers and engineers to host, build or upgrade a local Little Free Library with STEM. One community member created a smart STEM Little Library using the Infineon PSoC6 with Bluetooth security controls. This project helped share STEM resources with children in their community.
