Have a Question About the Sudden Impact Design Challenge? Ask it here!

Another great design challenge!

1. Christian, can you elaborate on the ownership of the designs we create? Does all our hardware, firmware and other software need to be open source/published? After the challenge, are we free to develop the design ourselves commercially?

2. Data is supposed to be transferred to a smartphone app in real-time. Bluetooth and wireless (I assume this means WiFi) are mentioned, but both of those will have problems getting sufficient range e.g. to cover a football field (or ski run!).

3. Will we need to send our hardware in for evaluation? Is the entry marked purely on design or also on implementation?

I think that they are going for having something a college or high school could build themselves therefor the open source.  As for the range you are correct in a real world solution both Bluetooth and wifi would not work as they would not have enough range with commonly available hardware.  That is what makes this challenge interesting.  I also like the independent testing part of the challenge, it gives the contestants a chance to see how their products stacked up against the others in the real world.  The real question is who ends up with the final product after the testing.

I think that they are going for having something a college or high school could build themselves therefor the open source.  As for the range you are correct in a real world solution both Bluetooth and wifi would not work as they would not have enough range with commonly available hardware.  That is what makes this challenge interesting.  I also like the independent testing part of the challenge, it gives the contestants a chance to see how their products stacked up against the others in the real world.  The real question is who ends up with the final product after the testing.

Hi!

As I understand, many stadiums have WiFi for the spectator areas, so an option could be to communicate using a different wireless tech (e.g. ISM band) to a gateway type device located at the edge of the spectator area, that then uses WiFi. Just an idea though. Alternatively perhaps WiFi coverage could be extended into the sports area.

Yet another idea (perhaps for some sports) would be for the participant to have a mobile device on them, so that the device can accept communication from the sensors via Bluetooth, and then transmit using WiFi or 4G/LTE to an application.

That really just proves my point: The brief for the challenge suggests Bluetooth or wireless, direct to a phone, but in a stadium full of 30,000+ smartphones, the 2.4GHz spectrum is going to be overcrowded.

My first thought was to use the sub-GHZ ISM band to transmit data from the players, but then you would need an intermediate hub to collate the data and distribute it to the smartphone (via Bluetooth or Wifi). That increases the scope of the project somewhat.

Well, WiFi can be channeled. There can be a WiFi connection for the crowd in one channel, and the players in another.

Point taken, but often you're not in control of what spectrum is in use. I think that 2.4GHz is the wrong frequency for a number of reasons, but I would use it for this challenge for reasons of simplicity.

I agree that it is likely the wrong frequency. Most times we use the wrong frequency. I vote for 60 Ghz.

I'm not knowledgeable on this, and this diagram is pretty poor but the entire spectator area gets served with hundreds of small sites. This allows all spectators to get good browsing/app experience. As Michael says, players or the stadium company and so on can have their own access over wifi too. Even for spectators there are ways to ensure that "important stuff" (like adverts etc : ) can get an amount of bitrate regardless of the amount of browsing spectators do. Whether all stadiums implement this I have no idea though : ( As you say, perhaps a combination of wireless tech is needed.

Yeah Shabaz, large events usually bring in mobile stations to increase coverage for everyone.

I kinda of figure you would not want to run on wifi as the bandwidth would be used up.