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Proposing the Feasibility of a Circuit Design Challenge-- What Do You Think?

rscasny

All of our design challenges to date have been what I call "system design" challenges. What I mean by that is element14 gives the challengers a kit of a few pre-built dev boards that are designed for rapid prototyping. The challenger use the boards to build a prototyped system. I think this approach works quite well to build something quickly in the 11 weeks that we give the challengers to build their projects.

 

But unlike some other project building sites out there, element14 is a community of engineers, not just makers, or hobbyists. Part of our mission is to promote the whole electronic design process. So, we want to offer something that promotes sound electronic circuit design.

 

This I mentioned to my bosses at element14 the possibility of offering a "circuit" design challenge. So, the goal of this challenge would be to design a circuit -- say, a switched-mode power supply -- with certain specifications. My guess is that the "kit" would include a tray of board-level components -- resistors, caps, inductors, diodes, MOSFETs, et. al -- pcb board, soldering tools, and a piece of test equipment (i.e., o'scope).

 

The deliverable of this design challenge would be a circuit soldered up on the pcb board and functioning within specs. Additional functionality would be given extra points. Of course, there would be prizes. The panel of jusges would probably be technology educators or academics; individuals who understood basic circuit design.

 

The required blogs would focus on how you designed the circuit, circuit analysis, why you made the decision choices that you made? What resources did you use to help and/or improve your circuit design? How you limited component count? How you dealt with a limited pcb board size?

 

The idea would need to be fleshed out some more.

 

But I personally want to build on the rapid prototyping concept of a design challenge to one that focuses on basic and complex circuit design.

 

Okay, that's my proposal.

 

What do you think of it?  How many would be interested in participating in this kind of design challenge?

 

If you were interested, how would you improve on the concept I have presented?

 

Randall Scasny

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  • Kudos for creativity in dreaming up new types of creative challenge. I like this idea a lot. The specifics of the circuit challenge will of course attract different members depending on what the target circuit is, but there is a lot of scope to attract different segments of the membership. For me this type of effort is attractive if it ends up to be a circuit I have a real use for, or a circuit that is a base for multiple uses, or possibly a circuit that could be sold as a product.

    Example 1: suppose the objective is to design a circuit board that contains all the circuitry for a small animatronic puppet. A sponsor might supply a microcontroller chip and a J-Tag programmer (plus IDE) and some small motors. Such a circuit board could be re-used as a platform in any number of automation applications.

    Example 2: an IoT platform with a certain minimum complement of built-in interfaces. Again such a card becomes a base platform that could be used in wide ranging applications.

    Example 3: perhaps you allow a COTS MCU card to be embedded such as an Arduino Micro - this provides a free development system for software, but the challenge could still require a certain minimum number of interfaces to be part of the custom motherboard.

    Example 4: a solar cell power supply with battery. This could be used to power any green project. There are reference designs for things like this, but it is still a challenge to make your own variant with a few extra features and get it working.

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  • Kudos for creativity in dreaming up new types of creative challenge. I like this idea a lot. The specifics of the circuit challenge will of course attract different members depending on what the target circuit is, but there is a lot of scope to attract different segments of the membership. For me this type of effort is attractive if it ends up to be a circuit I have a real use for, or a circuit that is a base for multiple uses, or possibly a circuit that could be sold as a product.

    Example 1: suppose the objective is to design a circuit board that contains all the circuitry for a small animatronic puppet. A sponsor might supply a microcontroller chip and a J-Tag programmer (plus IDE) and some small motors. Such a circuit board could be re-used as a platform in any number of automation applications.

    Example 2: an IoT platform with a certain minimum complement of built-in interfaces. Again such a card becomes a base platform that could be used in wide ranging applications.

    Example 3: perhaps you allow a COTS MCU card to be embedded such as an Arduino Micro - this provides a free development system for software, but the challenge could still require a certain minimum number of interfaces to be part of the custom motherboard.

    Example 4: a solar cell power supply with battery. This could be used to power any green project. There are reference designs for things like this, but it is still a challenge to make your own variant with a few extra features and get it working.

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