Hello Element14 community.

About one weak ago I received after some issues with UPS reward for my entry as part of Experimenting with Gesture Sensors competition which I recently won. As part of competition, I wrote 16 blogs, and this is seventeenth. In my blogs I described my opinions about MAX25405 Gesture Sensor and its evaluation kit as well as details about my progress and projects which I did as part of competition. If you are interested in more details about my competition entry or MAX25405, then feel free to read my summary blog or other blogs which I posted as part of competition.

The Reward

For my entry I won Grand Prize reward which was announced as iPad Pro and VIVE Cosmos VR System in value 2098 USD. It is the biggest and most expensive prize offered in Design Challenges ever as far as I know. But since I won several iPads in recent contests, I asked Element14 staff for changing iPad Pro by MacBook Air in similar (or lower value). They did their best and MacBook Air with M2 processor, extended 16 GB RAM and 256 GB of SSD fitted the budget. With HTC VIVE Cosmos Elite VR system both devices arrived in my home one week ago.

The MacBook is very interesting device. It is my first mac. Control is very different from normal computers. Even keyboard layout is very different and since my native language have special chars like ěščřžýáíé it was not easy but after basic reconfiguration I mastered it in few days. My motivation for getting this device was mainly in support for developing apps for iPhone which is impossible or very hard from Windows/Linux PCs. In meantime when I will not be developing apps for iPhone I will share this laptop with other family members, so even I will not use it on daily basis some other members will. After about week spend with MacBook my feeling is very positive. Thanks, element14 and especially Randall Scasny and Daniel Zima for organising and sending it to me.

The second part is HTC VIVE Cosmos Elite VR headset. I have never used VR for a longer period than period of basic evaluation. I had opportunity to try Microsoft HoloLens before, but this device is different. Even there are several practical usecases for VR headset still the most time I spend with testing VR games. It is very cool and impressive. For example, today I was repairing intergalactic robot, but I am not very skilled in this, so my robot completely broken and after my failure floor opened and all parts of broken robot felt down. All of this in my room! :D First step when using headset was freeing disk space for some games. VR Games consumes much more disk space than IDEs for MCU development. I think HTC should bundle additional SSD in the box :D . It is very cool device and even after week I do not know all its opportunities, but I am very happy about it and playing with it.

Closing

I am very happy about reward from this competition. It was very funny time to me play with MAX25405 in recent almost three months and now receive so big reward for it. I would like to thank all readers for reading this and my previous blogs. I would also like to thank Maxim Integrated (now ADI) for sponsoring this design challenge and of course I would like to thank Element14 staff and especially Randall Scasny and Daniel Zima for organising this contest, sending me free kit and later the reward. Thank you all.