The element14 Community continues to be the industry leading online community for professional engineers, makers, hobbyists and technology enthusiasts. In this, its 4th year of existence, the Community team celebrated its 200,000th member, a major upgrade to its website platform, and hundreds of successful product campaigns, contests and events. So far this year almost 8 million people from all over the world have visited the element14.com/community, I wanted to take some time and highlight a few of my favorite moments from the element14 Community this year.
Energy Harvesting Solutions Challenge
Selected competitors were provided with Energy Harvesting Solution to Go Kits from Wurth Eleckronik, and asked to make a new product--which will either use Energy Harvesting to replace a device that uses battery or mains power, or alternatively, create an entirely new gadget of their own design. The resulting prototypes were innovative and inspiring.
Back in February element14 Community presented the Raspberry Pi foundation with a giant Raspberry Pi cake at the Embedded World conference to celebrate Raspberry Pi’s 1st Birthday. The gesture got the attention of several publications and news agencies as well as our followers on social media and of course our element14 Community members.
While voting has just gotten underway; the amazing and creative content this challenge has generated put it as one of our yearly highlights. Community members were asked to use the Cypress PSoc4 Pioneer Kit to come up with “smarter” ways to do everyday things, with some wildly creative and intuitive results.
Shabaz Wins Member of the Year
“Shabaz” has been a member of the element14 Community since 2011 and has created dozens of blogs which have been viewed close to 100,000 times. This year he was voted as our Member of the year for his detailed but easy to read blogs in our Single Board Computer and Test and Measurement spaces and his helpful advice to other members throughout the community. Check out what Shabaz is up to by clicking on his profile.
Cabe Atwell, an element14 sponsored blogger, built a special effects door for Halloween using a Raspberry Pi. This drove over 20,000 views to the community site and was one of our most popular projects this year and helped launch our newly launched Pi Projects Space.
element14 teamed up with Adafruit on challenging five members to build wearable electronics projects that enhance their daily lives using the FLORA platform. Make sure you check out the winning entries, the FLORAbella and ColorCam.
element14 at MakerFaire Detroit:
element14 had the opportunity to work with Jason Kridner, designer of the BeagleBone Black, on running workshops demonstrating some of the single board computer’s functionality using JavaScript. We also got to connect with thousands of engineers, makers and customers from all over the Midwest region.
Single Board Computer Board Launched
Earlier this year the element14 Community team consolidated product specs and content of our single board computer offering in one space including the newly released Beagle Bone Black.
It’s no wonder the Cypress PSoC4 Pioneer Kit won our “product of the year” as chosen by our members. From May 1st – September 23rd representatives from Cypress posted projects that could be done using the PSoc4 Pioneer Kit. This generated hundreds of thousands of views and hundreds of comments from our members.
Ben Heck Accessibility Guitar: South African Ian Pierce lost his arm in an accident at a young age, up until that point he was a budding guitarist. 47 years later he performed for the first time using a guitar made by Ben Heck to accommodate people with disabilities.
Thanks for reading, make sure you let me know what some of your highlights were for 2013 in the comment field below!
Dave
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