Disappointed - My opinion

It's been a common issue amongst "giveaway" style contests that holding up the "other end of the bargain" seems to be an issue. RoadTests were another place where we saw this, although it has gotten better through Randall's efforts.

I think the biggest issue probably comes down to issues such as "overpromising" to try to make sure they get selected without a good understanding of the time requirement necessary to actually build, test, debug and document the project. Sometimes some things are underestimated on the expectation they're "easy" to replicate/achieve when unexpected roadblocks suddenly occur - technical or even "personal" ones. Others might overestimate their ability to learn and develop new skills in the time necessary. While some people will always be greedy for free stuff, it's often not the case that bad intentions were there to begin with. Other times, some people just don't have the experience and feel a little shy about writing or posting things seeing just how well others might be doing and so keep deferring until they have something "better" to show which may inevitably never happen. At that stage, they might just throw in the towel. After all, not everyone has the same level of interest, passion, experience, persistence, expertise, skill, dexterity and problem-solving ability necessary to overcome these issues. Marketing has a habit of making things "seem simple" - e.g. "here's a demo that you can get started with in under five minutes" - but taking it from there to an actually useful (albiet flawed or limited) prototype requires so much more ...

As with every project - it won't be a 100% success rate. A failure of the candidates to deliver is also a failure of element14 and the community to support them towards delivering something or to select those with a better probability of delivering. Having only the applications to go by, it's like betting on a horse - it's not easy. But if it even bears some fruit, the value of the return could exceed the outlay and still make it worthwhile doing.

- Gough

I feel that people tend to over-promise when they haven't done enough research on what they plan on doing. Some might try to propose a project that requires that they learn something new (which is good, because you're more likely to go through and learn it since you've made a commitment), but if the learning curve is too steep, they tend to abandon the project entirely.

The same seems to be happening for road tests occasionally: you tend to see some one/two paragraph reviews where the applicant simply states that 'the board was difficult to work with because of the lack of documentation', which if I recall correctly seems to be happening a lot with MCU dev boards, since people who have worked with Arduinos tends to try to jump in and try complicated ARM boards.

I'm guessing that they did have very good project proposals considering that e14 selected them, and the proposal format usually requires that an applicant includes data on their experience, skills & commitment.

One possible solution would be that besides simply including the 'idea' (i.e. what you want to build), e14 makes it compulsory to include:

• details like how an applicant plans on doing it: to check how well the applicant has researched the finer details of implementation (eg: number of ADCs/SPIs available for sensors on a particular MCU).
• for roadtests: has the applicant looked at the documentation of the product or tried out the software in demo mode?
• how familiar he/she is with the parts: a person who's only used an Arduino will probably not be able to build a complex FPGA project.
• what are the expected difficulties/why the project might not work - this will tell the reviewer whether the applicant understands the complexities of the project & understands how easy it will be to implement in practice (eg complex control systems  which require a lot of tuning).

I feel that people tend to over-promise when they haven't done enough research on what they plan on doing. Some might try to propose a project that requires that they learn something new (which is good, because you're more likely to go through and learn it since you've made a commitment), but if the learning curve is too steep, they tend to abandon the project entirely.

The same seems to be happening for road tests occasionally: you tend to see some one/two paragraph reviews where the applicant simply states that 'the board was difficult to work with because of the lack of documentation', which if I recall correctly seems to be happening a lot with MCU dev boards, since people who have worked with Arduinos tends to try to jump in and try complicated ARM boards.

I'm guessing that they did have very good project proposals considering that e14 selected them, and the proposal format usually requires that an applicant includes data on their experience, skills & commitment.

One possible solution would be that besides simply including the 'idea' (i.e. what you want to build), e14 makes it compulsory to include:

• details like how an applicant plans on doing it: to check how well the applicant has researched the finer details of implementation (eg: number of ADCs/SPIs available for sensors on a particular MCU).
• for roadtests: has the applicant looked at the documentation of the product or tried out the software in demo mode?
• how familiar he/she is with the parts: a person who's only used an Arduino will probably not be able to build a complex FPGA project.
• what are the expected difficulties/why the project might not work - this will tell the reviewer whether the applicant understands the complexities of the project & understands how easy it will be to implement in practice (eg complex control systems  which require a lot of tuning).