Seeking Your Feedback on a Beat Our Board Design Challenge - Grand Prize $5,000

I have neither the skills, knowledge or experience to take on such a challenge, “And For That Reason, I’m Out”. Barbara Corcoran Shark Tank host uses this catchphrase when she chooses not to pursue investing.

Something just doesn’t sit well with me about the approach to this challenge. I’m struggling with leveraging the community for the lion’s share of the benefits going to the sponsor. The sponsor reaps the benefits from the merits of an open-source community without having to invest.

Is it possible they gave marketing an engineering problem to solve? The brainstorming session came up with DER (Design Engineering Roulette). Participants invest their own resources against the house. You can bet as much as you like and often as you like because it’s fun and challenging for you! If the ball lands on your number, you collect the $5000 prize.

I never played Design Challenge for the prize, “And For That Reason, I’m Out”

Just seeing this now. Yeah - they seem to be pushing for a ready made complete product fully tested and validated. Many contests here are complete when running on a breadboard. The requirements really push this to a very high level. It would be fun to play with parts of the circuit though. Perhaps if it was broken down to smaller parts or lower requirements I’d be more interested in it.

Transformer size for the top ten and transformer exempt to win.

For the level of effort and research required, there are a lot of projects I would rather address than this. I'd have just enough interest to learn from the people that participate in this project. 

I think it is the unusual optics of the challenge that seem to raise IP issues. Every project published on a forum has the same IP issues. If someone develops some IP they want to protect, they simply wouldn't publish it on a forum - no risk and no stress involved in that course of action.

I don't think the manufacturer is fishing for some brilliant new design that doesn't even use their product. They are just taking a fun approach to illustrate that it is hard to develop a circuit that outperforms their product. And they are forking out some nice no-risk incentives to drum up interest and entice members to participate.

It should be a lot of fun for designers. I'm a little mystified why everyone seems to think it is scarier than any other design challenge. Except of course working with high voltage is scary... 

I have mixed feelings about this type of challenge.

Some companies prohibit their employees from using their talents in this type of event as they might unwittingly reveal company trade secrets.

This is not a trivial challenge, to succeed you will have to have some very good engineering skills and access to some sophisticated test equipment.

There is also the issue of intellectual property.

If someone comes up with a better design, will the sponsor own the rights to manufacture the solution or variants using ideas from the challenge?

Yes, you could win $5,000 , but you could miss out on potentially high value royalties from the sale of the product.

Even if I had the skills, I would not enter this type of challenge without first consulting a lawyer on my IP rights.

This is an intriguing challenge. Designing a power supply is not an impossible task, especially since a working schematic is provided. For sure it will be tough to beat the performance of the reference design, but that is an objective to strive for, not a requirement in order to win. You are not competing with the manufacturer's design, you are competing against other contestants.

You could or would essentially clone the reference design, except substituting other GaN devices and try little tricks to improve efficiency, like heavier copper. 

Given that there is a free shopping cart to buy components, it would seem to be a good, low-cost, opportunity to try your hand at a power supply design challenge.

I am kicking the idea around a bit, but so far not too keen on spending 6 months on this. I think I have a 2 KW 150V supply in storage, but I can't get near 500V. My normal bench supply only goes to 60V and it can only supply 2A.

Like Michael, it has been a long while since I did heavy duty automotive compliant design.

Additionaly there is high voltage nature of the project and related safety and legal issues. For example, in my country, it is prohibited to work with live parts with voltage higher than 25VAC or 60VDC without qualification which this competition limit to professionals only.

I do not think it is project outsorcing, but showing that it is impossible to beat board is very crazy marketing campaign, so in my opinion it is more like converting marketing effort to enginnering effort which is interesting.

I think this approach may work with different kind of board where the several upgrades are possible. For example imagine upgrading Arduino competition. You have plenty of options like adding onboard debugger, sensor, some different connector, power consumption monitor, changing chips, .... But in case of purely analog and power evaluation boards it is quite hard because there are very limited options how to make it better.

I voted NO. The last poll should ask "do you have access to at least 500VDC"

This is not a design challenge, this is project outsourcing. I agree with michaelkellett 's quote estimate. 

Just a 6 layer PCB with 2 oz outside copper from one of the far east proto vendors is US$ 167.