The event was organized by Renesas Electronics in partnership with EFY Enterprises Pvt. Ltd. (Managing Partner) and Element 14 (Logistic Partner). It was organized to encourage the hobbyists, students, professional design engineers, academic professionals and young engineers to design and create innovative applications in the field of embedded systems using the Sakura board.
Gadget Renesas (GR)
Gadget Renesas is a promotion Project that offers a series of boards and cloud based (easy to start with) software environment to embedded professionals for rapid prototyping. It has the following key points to be noted:
- Provides rapid prototyping solution for students, embedded professionals and hobbyists.
- Provides a cloud based software development environment which enables the use of smart phones and tablets as a user software development platform.
- Promote the user community site to encourage the users to ask questions, to share information and to announce information related to events.
- To provide Arduino compatible boards with high performance and advanced onchip peripherals like USB host and Ethernet.
What is Sakura board?
GR Sakura is the first available board by Gadget Renesas. It is a development board that is Open Source Compatible and is completely compatible with Arduino Programming Language (using Renesas online compiler as the programming platform). It is a compact board embedding 32 bit RX, which is a tiny but a powerful microcontroller.
Board Features
- USB function pins
- Ethernet (RJ45) pins-to avail LAN and remote download
- USB host pins (A)
- MicroSD jacket-enables data sharing with PC
- XBee ready pins- for wireless remote download
- Additional service pins to provide advanced timer input/outputs
- JTAG pins-to enable E1 emulator debugging
RX specifications
- 32-bit high performance CPU-R5F563NBDDFP ） RX63N 100-pin
- Operating frequency: 96 Mhz
- Flash ROM: 1M Bytes, RAM：128K bytes,
- Data flash：32K bytes
- Communication features: USB (host/function), Ether-MAC, I2C, SPI, CAN, IE Bus
- Timers 16-bit (MTU, TPU, CMT), 8-bit TMR, independent WDT, WDT, PPG
- 12 / 10-bit ADC, temperature sensor, data transfer (DMAC, DTC)
Overview of the contest
The contest began in May 2013 with a call for abstract and received a response of about 580 registrations. Entries were received from various spheres starting from leading technical institutes like NITs, IITs, Anna University, Delhi Technological University to companies like Honeywell, TCS, Bosch, etc and many small design houses submitted their abstracts for innovative designs. Amongst these top 100 abstracts were provided the GR Sakura board for actual development and were given a time duration of 3 months for the same. After a series of evaluations Renesas invited top 20 contestants to showcase their projects at the Grand Finale held on 3rd December 2013 at Radisson Blue, New Delhi.
All the projects present were so much innovative and were unique in some way or the other. There was a sense of nervousness and pride amongst all the participants that could be seen easily during the event. The event began at 11:00 AM after the registration was over. There was a brief introduction of the event by Renesas and then everyone dispersed for lunch however the contestants wanted to give a last minute touch to their projects and very busy in the same. The real play started at 1:00 PM with the judges moving from table to table understanding the projects in details and their application in the real scenario.
The tension neutralized only after the distribution of the awards between 4:00 to 5:00 PM. There were different categories of awards and the winners under each category are listed below.
Winners
This was not the end, first five entries for the contest received a prize of Rs. 3000 each as a motivation to participation. Following are the list of first five entries:
- GPS GSM based vehicle tracking system, Sushila Devi Bansal College of Engineering, Indore
- Automatic Diesel Generator Control on Main Supply Power Failure, Power Grid Corporation of India Ltd, Muzaffarpur
- In vehicle smartphone diagnostics and cloud monitor, Mobiveil, Chennai
- Fault Analyzer for Industrial Rotary Machines, K.S.Rangasamy College of Technology, Tiruchengode
- Retro Urban Game Console using Led Matrix and Hand held Controller, Bhartiya Vidya Peeth’s College Of Engineering, New Delhi
About Renesas
Renesas under the name of Renesas Electronics is one of the largest manufacturers of semiconductor solutions that include microcontrollers, System on Chip (SoCs) solutions and a broad range of analog and power devices. They started their business operation in April 2010 through the integration of NEC Electronics Corporation and Renesas Technology Corp. They are head quartered in Japan and the world’s number one supplier of microcontrollers with operations spanning research, development, design and manufacturing for a wide range of applications.
Sneha Ambastha is technical journalist at EFY Gurgaon
