And the Simply AVR Design Contest winners are…

Back in March, Atmel launched the second stage of its Simply AVR Design Contest, which encouraged Makers, designers and engineers to develop clever, ground-breaking 8-bit microcontroller-based designs using its highly-popular AVR family. After several months of ideation and submissions, we’re excited to announce that the grand prize winner of the contest is Juan Gonzalez for his IoT ATmega2560-powered robot.

Programmed with Atmel Studio 6.2, the winning IoT project — which garnered nearly 116,000 votes — runs in three modes including Wi-Fi via an Android application, object-tracking mode and MIMIC mode via TCP/IP.

“Atmel AVR MCUs are simple to use, have a robust ecosystem and are extremely flexible, allowing beginner developers to create innovative, out-of-the-box embedded designs beyond traditional applications,” explained Gonzalez.

“The ATmega-powered IoT robot only took me a couple days to put together and I was thrilled when I was notified. Thank you to the Atmel team for enabling me to showcase my design. I will continue to design with AVR MCUs.”

In total, five winners were selected through public voting on the contest site and Facebook; meanwhile, a separate Simply AVR Design Contest was conducted in parallel in China. Runner-ups included:

Sumit Grover, Remote and GSM-based home automation system

Savvas-George Kokkinidis-Loungos, Wireless remote car device using hand movements

Shreyas Gite, Arduino-powered medical scanner to measure body temperature and other vitals

Rahul Kar, Digital Soduku solver

“I’d like to congratulate our winners for the Simply AVR Design Contest,” said Sander Arts, Atmel Vice President of Marketing. “With over 300,000 votes for all five winners, there was clearly a lot of enthusiasm for the second phase of the Simply AVR Contest. All these projects showcased creative, impressive designs that demonstrate the simplicity of Atmel’s AVR MCUs which extend beyond the traditional boundaries. With a community of AVR enthusiasts, we are looking forward to the continuation of this program.”

With another successful challenge in the books, we’re eager to see what the future holds for these Makers’ prototypes. Perhaps, they will follow in the footsteps of previous design contest champion Pamungkas Prawisuda Sumasta, who recently launched a Kickstarter campaign for his team’s Phoenard all-in-one prototyping device.

Those wishing to browse through some of the other submitted creations can head over to the contest’s official gallery here.