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.
