https://community.element14.com/challenges-projects/project14/Monthly Electronics & Design Project Competitions. Build projects around themes, submit video proof, and win free products regardless of level of expertise.en-USTelligent Community 12https://community.element14.com/challenges-projects/project14/p/make-a-connectionThu, 16 Jul 2026 11:12:00 GMT93d5dcb4-84c2-446f-b2cb-99731719e767:0766d930-eee8-4cfa-8ecc-3de21ec91b11Beep beep beep! Calling all creators! Build an electronics project that sends a message or signal and be in with a chance of winning a prize. It could be a radio, a telegraph key, a miniature lighthouse, a semaphore system with flags or moving arms - it is completely up to you and the more creative/innovative it is, the better! There are lots of prizes up for grabs with a First-Place prize, three Second-Place prizes, and three Runner-Up prizes to be awarded to the best submissions. Each winner will have their choice of one prize from a selection of three for each category. The Prizes FIRST PLACE (choose one of the below) Valve Steam Deck OLED 512GB SSD + 16GB RAM SECOND PLACE (choose one of the below) RUNNERS UP (choose one of the below) Don't worry if a prize is out of stock in your region or does not have the right plug for you. We can ship from global stocks, include a plug adaptor, or find a local equivalent of a prize. How To Win To be in the running to win the prize, submit your project here as a blog by midnight (23:59 UK time) on 30th August 2026 . Just one project blog covering all the aspects of your project is required. You can share a project you have in progress on the community, or one you haven’t posted about before. There are many years of previous competition entries to get inspired by, but why not take a look at some recent projects that community members have shared to give you an idea of what kind of detail, layout, images, videos etc. are expected: For a full guide on how to write a winning project blog, click here . Important Dates Competition Phases Dates Build Period 16 th July – 13 th September 2026 Projects Due 23:59 UK time 13 th September 2026 Winners Announced 18 th September 2026 Prizes Shipped September 2026 The Rules Submit your creation as a project blog using the button below. Don't forget to: Share step-by-step how you built your project. Explain how your creation relates to the theme of electronics projects that send a message or signal. Demonstrate your complete and functional project with a video and photographs. Demonstrate your originality, innovation, and the technical merit of your project. Plus, high-quality images and videos are always appreciated! If you have any problems with the element14 Community or engaging with the competition, please "Report a Problem" in Feedback and Support . About Project14 Competitions This is your opportunity to build an electronics project using just what you have lying around, what you can upcycle or purchase, and be in with a chance of winning a prize! Project14 competitions are lots of fun, no pressure, and a chance to share with like-minded engineers and makers across the world.https://community.element14.com/challenges-projects/project14/p/show-and-tell-your-electronics-projectsWed, 08 Jul 2026 15:18:00 GMT93d5dcb4-84c2-446f-b2cb-99731719e767:1d08ee81-2511-48f4-90bc-3bdb185635f3Have you ever built an exciting electronics project but have nowhere to show it off? Share it on the element14 Community in our Show & Tell competition! It could be something you built previously in your spare time, at work, as part of your university studies, or something you are working on right now. All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning is write a blog and include all the photos, videos, diagrams, code, etc. that you can. How To Win To be in the running to win the prize, submit your project here as a blog: When writing your project entry, you will be expected to include: Your plan for your project, how it works and what it does, and what inspired you to build it. Document step-by-step how you built your project. Any interesting problems you ran into and how you solved them or worked around them. If your project is a work in progress, document what stage your project is at right now and what is working/not working, and what your remaining challenges are. Click here for a full guide on how to write a winning project blog. Below are some recent projects submitted by community members to give you an idea of potential layouts for project blogs and how you can incorporate images etc. into your blog: Important Dates Competition open for submissions 24th June - 30th August 2026 Deadline for submissions 23:59 UK time 30th August 2026 Winners announced 4th September 2026 Prizes shipped (estimated) 11th September 2026 If you have any problems with the element14 Community or engaging with the competition, please "Report a Problem" in Feedback and Support . About Project14 Competitions This is your opportunity to build an electronics project using just what you have lying around, what you can upcycle or purchase, and be in with a chance of winning a prize! Project14 competitions are lots of fun, no pressure, and a chance to share with like-minded engineers and makers across the world.https://community.element14.com/challenges-projects/project14/b/show-and-tell/posts/forth-based-esp32-multipurpose-modulesWed, 08 Jul 2026 05:21:00 GMT93d5dcb4-84c2-446f-b2cb-99731719e767:d4ac3e93-a83e-48f3-90bf-66e3d24cfda7ToniguzziBotBased on low cost esp32 development boards. SAK32 is an interactive Forth REPL for the ESP32. Type commands at the prompt to control hardware, fetch web data, share sensor readings across multiple devices and automate tasks — all without recompiling. Connect via Serial (115200 baud) or Telnet (port 23) and you get an immediate interactive prompt. Define words, save them to flash, and they survive reboots. Load complex word sets from remote files with file-exec. SAK32 is designed to be generic — no hardcoded IPs or device-specific code in the sketch. All site-specific configuration lives in your .fth files.https://community.element14.com/challenges-projects/project14/b/show-and-tell/posts/station_2d00_202_2d00_raspberry_2d00_pi_2d00_surveillance_2d00_monitorMon, 29 Jun 2026 20:32:00 GMT93d5dcb4-84c2-446f-b2cb-99731719e767:2b04284a-f294-4b54-85e8-680d5084eb3fapn201I bought a Raspberry Pi 3 a few years ago to enter an art competition. I never opened the box. The competition passed. The box sat on a shelf. Later I needed something small to run my home automation, so I finally opened it and put Home Assistant on it. It did that quietly for a long time. When I moved Home Assistant to a PC, the Pi was free again, and I decided to finally use it for what I bought it for. This is that project. The plan Station 202 is a small camera pointed at my desk that renders what it sees as a coarse field of green pixels in a web browser. It looks like a surveillance monitor from an old test rig that everyone forgot about. The part I care about most is technical, not visual: no real image ever leaves the Pi. The camera frame is reduced on the device to a tiny grid of brightness levels, and only that grid is sent out. You cannot rebuild a face, a screen, or a document from it. The thing that makes it look like degraded art is the same thing that makes it safe to put on the public internet. I work in IT security by day, where the whole job is deciding who is allowed to see what. The other half of my time goes to film and code. This sits exactly on the line between the two: a camera that is always on, watched by no one in particular, that is built so it physically cannot leak a usable picture. . community.element14.com/.../statement.mp4 How it works Raspberry Pi 3 + camera web server browser --------------------------- ----------------- ------------------- capture -> grayscale -> relay (Flask): HTML5 canvas: downscale to 100x56 -> keeps newest grid, grid -> green pixels quantise to levels 0-9 -> serves it over SSE (or ASCII characters) push the grid only, outbound one-way out recorded "tapes" when nobody is at the desk The Pi never opens an inbound port. It only pushes outbound. The web server can be fully compromised and the worst anyone gets is a screen of green blocks. How I built it, step by step 1. The Pi and the broken camera The camera module is damaged. For normal photography it is useless - soft, low contrast, partly out of focus. For this it is perfect, and the defects are part of the look. Lesson one of the project: a broken sensor is still a working sensor if your output is 5,600 pixels of green. 2. Capture and reduce on the device Capture with picamera2 , convert to grayscale and downscale with OpenCV, then quantise every pixel to one of ten brightness levels. That last step is the whole privacy model. The output is a string of digits, nothing else. python import cv2 , numpy as np from picamera2 import Picamera2 COLS , ROWS = 100 , 56 picam2 = Picamera2 ( ) picam2 . configure ( picam2 . create_preview_configuration ( main = { "size" : ( 320 , 240 ) , "format" : "RGB888" } ) ) picam2 . start ( ) frame = picam2 . capture_array ( ) gray = cv2 . cvtColor ( frame , cv2 . COLOR_RGB2GRAY ) small = cv2 . resize ( gray , ( COLS , ROWS ) , interpolation = cv2 . INTER_AREA ) # the only thing that ever leaves the Pi: 5,600 digits, 0-9 levels = ( small . astype ( np . uint16 ) * 9 // 255 ) . clip ( 0 , 9 ) . astype ( np . uint8 ) grid = "" . join ( map ( str , levels . flatten ( ) . tolist ( ) ) ) 3. The browser renderer The page reads the grid and draws one filled rectangle per cell, brightness scaled to green. The same data can be drawn as ASCII characters instead - that was the original look, but at this resolution the characters turn to mush, so blocky pixels are the default and ASCII is an option in a "tune" menu. javascript // grid is a string of digits; draw it as green blocks for ( let y = 0 ; y < rows ; y ++ ) { for ( let x = 0 ; x < cols ; x ++ ) { const lv = grid . charCodeAt ( y * cols + x ) - 48 ; // '0'..'9' if ( lv === 0 ) continue ; const s = lv / 9 ; ctx . fillStyle = ` rgb(0, ${ ( 255 * s ) | 0 } , ${ ( 70 * s ) | 0 } ) ` ; ctx . fillRect ( x * cw , y * ch , cw + 1 , ch + 1 ) ; } } 4. Recorded "tapes" for when I am away Instead of video files, the recorded material is stored in the same grid format - a small JSON file of frames that the browser replays through the exact same renderer. So a recording and the live feed look identical, because they are the same kind of data. The files are almost all repeated digits, so they compress to very little. 5. The relay and the presence gate A tiny Flask service on the web server keeps only the newest grid and streams it to browsers over Server-Sent Events. SSE because it reconnects itself and survives a tab left open for days. python @app . get ( "/feed" ) def feed ( ) : def stream ( ) : last = - 1 while True : if state [ "version" ] != last and fresh ( ) : last = state [ "version" ] yield f"data: { state [ 'frame' ] } \n\n" else : yield ": keepalive\n\n" time . sleep ( 0.25 ) return Response ( stream ( ) , mimetype = "text/event-stream" ) The Pi only pushes when it sees motion during set hours, so the live feed means I am actually at the desk. Otherwise the relay goes stale and the browser falls back to a recording on its own. Problems I ran into Per-character drawing was slow. The first ASCII version called the canvas text function thousands of times per frame. I capped the frame rate to about 12 fps (a degraded monitor should be slow anyway) and later moved the default to filled rectangles, which are much cheaper than glyphs. Opening the page from a file did nothing. Browsers treat file:// as a unique origin and block the page from fetching the word list and recordings. Serving the folder over a normal web server ( python3 -m http.server while testing) fixed it. The canvas went blank when media came from another domain. Reading pixels back from a canvas that has loaded a cross-origin video taints it and throws. Hosting everything on one origin avoids it entirely. SSE stuttered behind nginx. The reverse proxy was buffering the stream. Turning off proxy_buffering for that one location made it real-time again. Proving the privacy claim. I had to be sure nothing recoverable leaves the device. The answer is in the pipeline: the only data on the wire is 5,600 digits between 0 and 9. There is no frame buffer to leak because it never exists outside the Pi. Current status Working: live capture and reduction on the Pi, the browser renderer in both pixel and ASCII modes, recorded tape playback, the relay over SSE, motion-gated live switching, and a "tune" panel for display settings. It runs continuously and is reachable on the public internet through a reverse proxy, with the Pi joined over Tailscale. Not finished: the live presence detection still needs tuning so brief stillness does not drop the feed; autoplay of recorded material is fussy on some mobile browsers; and the damaged camera occasionally needs a restart, which I want to make automatic with a watchdog. It started as a Pi I bought for a competition and never opened. It is now entering one.generativeartpicamera2flaskprivacyopencvasciiartsseraspberry piraspberrypicanvaspicameraarthttps://community.element14.com/challenges-projects/project14/m/managed-videos/151510Mon, 29 Jun 2026 20:26:00 GMT93d5dcb4-84c2-446f-b2cb-99731719e767:5169b3f5-586e-4a1f-9f70-94932181b729element14 Communityhttps://community.element14.com/challenges-projects/project14/m/managed-videos/151509Mon, 29 Jun 2026 20:26:00 GMT93d5dcb4-84c2-446f-b2cb-99731719e767:f3c378d1-e2e2-4652-9432-e11f2fac8864element14 Communityhttps://community.element14.com/challenges-projects/project14/m/managed-videos/151508Mon, 29 Jun 2026 20:25:00 GMT93d5dcb4-84c2-446f-b2cb-99731719e767:4ab527d8-f6c1-4ea0-a4cd-7a106d11b0ecelement14 Communityhttps://community.element14.com/challenges-projects/project14/b/show-and-tell/posts/cutebitrobotThu, 25 Jun 2026 18:06:00 GMT93d5dcb4-84c2-446f-b2cb-99731719e767:e7cf8eca-780a-4f51-a3d4-ee7b7d004635arjunkulkarniThe Expressive AI Desktop Robot CuteBit is an open-source, voice-controlled AI robot that combines a powerful Local LLM "Brain" (running on a host PC) with an expressive ESP32 "Body" . Unlike standard voice assistants, CuteBit has a physical presence, capable of moving, expressing emotions via animated eyes, and responding to natural language commands with personality. GitHubespraspberry pihttps://community.element14.com/challenges-projects/project14/b/makevemberTue, 16 Jun 2026 14:18:00 GMT93d5dcb4-84c2-446f-b2cb-99731719e767:10070507-eefa-4a01-8dac-3585244c96beProjects and Creations for the Makers Month of Novemberhttps://community.element14.com/challenges-projects/project14/b/make-a-connectionTue, 16 Jun 2026 13:40:00 GMT93d5dcb4-84c2-446f-b2cb-99731719e767:1767bdd8-b5e1-46c6-89d3-506349394ff6Post your Project Competition Entries for the Make a Connection competitionhttps://community.element14.com/challenges-projects/project14/b/show-and-tellTue, 16 Jun 2026 13:15:00 GMT93d5dcb4-84c2-446f-b2cb-99731719e767:99addf86-7e7a-4b91-900a-8abfeec01dc5Post your Project Competition Entries for the Show and Tell competition