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

Hi Jeremy -

1. Yes to both points; we want the initial solution to be open source, but what you develop with it afterwards is yours to do.

2. We don't expect perfect solutions, just better than what we have now (namely, very little!)

3. It's marked on the criteria listed in the detailed description: we expect the winning solution to be the most practical one, which will be tested by Leeds Beckett University.

Best Regards, Christian

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.

One more question:

I have seen in the past that the $500 budget has been in the form of a Farnell Store coupon code. If your project utilises parts that are only distributed through someone else, lets say, Sparkfun, what would be the method of using the $500 budget to retrieve those parts?

Joshua -

We have acquired parts from other suppliers from time to time: for example, in an Energy Harvesting challenge, we purchased a difficult to obtain electro-chemical sensor from Japan.  In other words, we'll look at fulfilling requirements outside Farnell that cannot be fulfilled any other way.

Best Regards, Christian

Ah. That is great - thank for for the quick response, yet again.

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.