IQRF Wireless Challenge II Finals: The best wireless applications designed Mark Wendler, Béla Bartos, Jiří Hodan, Csaba Nagy, Roman Ondráček, Daniel Veltruský and Tomáš Rottenberg

IQRF Wireless Challenge II, the contest for the best wireless applications, revealed its winners. There were 47 contestants from 14 countries registered in the contest. The final round was an interactive exhibition of the top ten projects. It took place at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of Czech Technical University in Prague on May 27, 2016. The best applications were designed by participants from the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania.

IQRF Alliance and MICRORISC announced the second year of the IQRF Wireless Challenge contest in November 2015. “Test your skills, submit your application for the IQRF wireless technology and compete for valuable prizes totaling 3,700 EUR”; this was a challenge for all technicians, programmers, developers and students from all over the world. They competed in two categories - Developer and Student.

The first place in the Developer category won Virtual Laboratory project by Mark Wendler and Béla Bartos from Óbuda University in Hungary. This home control system with support for Windows Phone and Android was very sophisticated. The second place got a project Wireless Current Probe by Jiří Hodan from the Czech Republic. Csaba Nagy from University Sapientia in Romania won the third position for High precision synchronization for ultrasound based robot tracking.

Grammar School Boskovice was highly successful in the Student category. The first place got Roman Ondráček with led_controller application and the third place got Tomáš Rottenberg with project Trioxygen, both from Grammar School Boskovice. Second place went to Daniel Veltruský from Technical High School Ječná in Prague for the project Real sunshine intensity compared to web application „OpenWeather“.

In the first phase, submitted projects were evaluated by a jury of engineers who develop the wireless platform IQRF. In the Finals, the jury was expanded by disinterested experts from the media partners of the competition. "I am excited about the benefits of competing projects, they show examples of the use of the wireless platform IQRF and easy connection of the IQRF to other platforms," ​​said Šimon Chudoba, CEO of the IQRF Alliance. "The competing projects were interesting and beneficial, each one in other way. Final resolution of the jury was really difficult, because the results were very close somewhere,” said Vladimír Šulc, CEO of the company MICRORISC. The most interesting projects will be revealed at www.doitwireless.com.

Tab. 1: Results in Developer category

Tab. 2: Results in Student category

Description of the 10 final projects

1. Wireless current probe, Jiří Hodan, Czech Republic

The construction is designed to measure AC current, primarily home installations, wireless transmission of measured data and saving them to disk or to a remote data store. It allows optimizing the loading of phases based on the measured results to predict the required size of the parent breaker. In case of failure can be based on measured data better and faster to find the fault. Due to the modular design can be custom install easily adapt to the user.

2. High precision synchronization for ultrasound based robot tracking, Csaba Nagy, University Sapientia, Romania

The goal of this project is to use the IQRF transceiver modules in a system where high precision clock synchronization is necessary. The old system was implemented with RS485-bus between the receiving nodes, infrared synchronization between the mobile robot and nodes. This method achieves 6us synchronization jitter by manipulating the rx filter and using the clock recovery output. This method is used in an indoor ultrasound based robot tracking project, where replaces the unreliable infrared synchronization and RS485 data bus. It can be used in other applications where the required synchronization jitter cannot be greater than 10us. This type of project can be gunshot detection, forest guard or light blinking applications.

3. Control of home network, Petr Hejhal, Czech Republic

Management of home network using a Bluetooth module connected to IQRF module. There is a possibility to use in the home without the need to solve complex control system and storage on the Internet.

4. Trioxygen, Tomáš Rottenberg, Czech Republic

Trioxygen is an experimental project that provides both abstraction and implementation of cryptographic protocols for IQRF transmitter. More precisely, Trioxygen allows IQRF modules and similar devices to communicate perfectly safe. Trioxygen component of the project is a demonstration application that is directly related to the topic of IQRF Wireless Challenge - light.

5. Virtual Laboratory, Mark Wendler, Béla Bartos, Óbuda University, Hungary

Application example of IQRF with HomeGenie and open source home automation software. It is a smart home control system. The strengths are user-friendly interface, Windows Phone and Android app support and using an open source platform. There are many possible extensions like 3 or 4 channel RGB LED controlling (color mixing), voice control, NFC check in - permission control system, implementing security system, weather station, controlling sanitary system.

6. Implementation of AES 128b for IQRF, Michal Ansorge, Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Republic

The project has been about incorporating of functions to encrypt and decrypt 16i blocks of plain text using AES 128b. These functions are called after reading user data eg. from OS buffer bufferRF and in blocks of 16i bits encrypt or decrypt their content and write them back into the buffer.

7. Real sunshine intensity compared to web application „OpenWeather“, Daniel Veltruský, Technical High School Ječná in Prague, Czech Republic

The project aims to facilitate communication with the illumination intensity sensor with IQRF module. First module measures light intensity and forward it to the second IQRF module which receives the measured data and forward them via UART into any system. The system will include application that will be forwarding data to a special service application. This application will compare the data with the platform "OpenWeather". It will be possible to obtain a deviation of these data and the data actually measured.

8. Increasing and decreasing of brightness via Arduino and IQRF, Tomáš Straka, Marek Neruda, Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Republic

The project links two different platforms in order to extend the possibility of using IQRF modules. IQRF wireless module is connected with IQRF-BB-02 (resp. Equivalent to its older version IQRF-SHIELD-02). It is connected with the platform Arduino UNO board, which is also connected RGB LED. Serial peripheral interface SPI is used for communication. The controller (DK-EVAL-04A and TR-72DA) sends a signal that shows brightness increase and decrease via a diode. This can also be achieved by using IQRF IDE - the terminal sends any code, and the result is the same as pressing a button. The main program is recorded at UNO board and works on the principle of "if you accept the signal and increase / decrease the brightness."

9. RGB matrix, Martin Branný, Smichovska secondary technical school in Prague, Czech Republic

Expansion module for output pins and a demonstration of their functionality using RGB LEDs, which produces RGB matrix. This is a demonstration of the possibilities of using IQRF for demanding applications (applications that require a lot of output pins).

10. led_controller, Roman Ondráček, Grammar School Boskovice, Czech Republic

The aim of this work was to create an RGB LED controller with which he could comfortably control the LED strip from a computer or mobile phone. During development of the project we developed library for PHP framework Nette to communicate with IQRF Cloud API.