AWS News Blog
Congratulations to the Winners of the Hackster AWS IoT Mega Contest
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Earlier this year I told you about the AWS IoT Mega Contest. The contest closed at the end of January, the judges retired to our secret lair deep in the heart of Seattle, and we have chosen the winners. There were an impressive number of equally impressive projects and it was not easy to evaluate them against our criteria and to pick our favorites. After extended deliberation, we managed to choose ten projects. With no further fanfare, here we go!
First Prize
The following two entrants will receive the first prize, a Kindle Fire HD 10:
- Chris Synan – Voice Controlled Drone with Amazon Echo and 3DR IRIS+.
- Marian Mihailescu – Baby NAP (Night Activity Program).
Second Prize
The following three entrants will receive the second prize, an Amazon Echo:
- Arlo Carreon – Magic Mirror – Amazon Echo and AWS IoT.
- Kittitouch Areerob – Automatic Vehicle Accident Alert System using AWS IoT.
- Tan See Youu – Crying AED.
Third Prize
The following five entrants will receive the third prize, Amazon Fire TV Gaming Edition:
- Daniel Porrey – AWS IoT Button for LIFX.
- Demirhan Aydin – WaterPi: Houseplant Remote Watering and Monitoring System.
- truthkos – Ambient Light Sensor for Philips Hue.
- Aaron Parecki – Magic Checkin Clock.
- Carmelito Andrade – Plant Monitoring System using AWS IoT.
What I Learned
After spending time examining the entries in detail, I came away impressed by a couple of things. To wit:
- There are lots of creative people out there! The initial ideas and the resulting projects were literally all over the map.
- IoT is here now. People are building devices, sites, and applications that are sophisticated and useful.
- Connecting to and working within the real world is a lot harder than running within the clean, abstract confines of a virtual machine. A successful IoT application must be prepared to deal with erroneous or missing data, intermittent connections, and more.
- Building these applications requires and exercises a diverse set of skills. In addition to creativity, a successful IoT project can require theoretical & practical electronics skills (both analog and digital), 3D modeling & printing, along with the ability to write code that runs on small devices and in the cloud, generally using multiple languages, frameworks, and cloud services! If you currently have a subset of these skills, jumping in to IoT is a great way to put them to use.
Congratulations & Thanks
Congratulations to all of the winners, and thank you to everyone who entered! Also, a big thank-you to our device partners and to the team at Hackster.
— Jeff;