One of the questions I often receive as Roadtest Program Manager is regarding new roadtesters. Do I use new roadtesters? Or, Do I Need New Roadtesters? The answer is Yes! Yes!! and Yes Again!!! element14 promotes our roadtests in newsletters, social media channels, and word-of-mouth in order to obtain new roadtesters for the program. I start pre-roadtest discussions (Ex. #1 #2 ) on the community to stimulate interest in roadtests, as well.
How do you select new roadtesters? That's another question that comes up. When I read all the roadtest applications (yes, I read all of them), I look for new roadtesters who have a background on the product or technology, and an interest in spending the time to test it and write a review. The time and availability often is a deciding factor for new roadtesters. Some roadtests are indeed time consuming. Also, new roadtesters have a small learning curve on what to include in an element14 roadtest review. This is covered in our four RoadTest Getting Started documents:
New roadtesters have a variety of backgrounds. Some are undergraduate college students. I sometimes get PhD candidates as new roadtesters, as well. I also have educators, and parents as roadtesters for products that would appeal to them such as micro:bit. But experienced engineers are the "meat" of the roadtesters group. No matter if you are new or experienced roadtester, if you write an interesting application, express a desire to test a product, and demonstrate an interest in participating in the element14 community, you can be competitively selected as an official roadtester.
In the last year, we brought on a good number of new roadtesters. Today, I went through all the roadtest reviews and selected ones from new roadtesters that I thought were great efforts for the first time out. Not all of the roadtests themselves were necessarily easy or worked out pitch perfect. That's the nature of the engineering discipline. But the reviews of all these new roadtesters and how they communicated their experience of the product were both interesting and informative. Listed by (in alphabetical order) are my choices for the best new roadtesters of 2022:
- aaryan2134 - Flusso FLS110 Mass Flow Sensor Evaluation Kit
- DaveTheWalker - MPS MA732 MagAlpha Angle Sensor Kit with Servo Motor - Industrial Sensing
- Guillaume_Martin - MPS MA732 MagAlpha Angle Sensor Kit with Servo Motor - Industrial Sensing
- ischonfeld - Microchip AVR-IoT Cellular Mini Dev Board for LTE-M and NB-IOT Prepaid SIM
- pphilippos - Summer of FPGAs: Microchip Polarfire FPGA Eval Kit Introduction | Part 1 | Part 2
(Note: While this roadtest was launched in 2021, we did not receive the kit until 2022.) - robertoquintal - Flusso FLS110 Mass Flow Sensor Evaluation Kit
- VWeaver - Microchip AVR-IoT Cellular Mini Dev Board for LTE-M and NB-IOT Prepaid SIM
I would like to thank all these members for their participation in the element14 Roadtest Program.
