Arduino, Qualcomm Technologies and Edge Impulse teamed up with Hackster this year to run Invent the Future, a competition built entirely around the Arduino® UNO™ Q board and Arduino App Lab. The numbers alone say something about how much appetite there is for an accessible edge-AI dev board: 4,028 registrants, 1,202 hardware applications, and 153 final project submissions across multiple categories. Judging wrapped this week, and Arduino’s own blog is now spotlighting the category winners.
Best Social Impact went to Smart Water Guardian AI by KOCHONI Biaou David Barthélémy — an edge-AI water-quality monitor reading temperature, pH, turbidity and dissolved solids in real time to catch anomalies that correlate with contamination. Best in Home Automation went somewhere more unexpected: Coders Cafe’s Smart Coop 2.0, which uses local AI models to detect eggs and predators (coyotes, foxes) and automate feed dispensing and heating for a chicken coop.
Best in Gaming is the one that’ll make builders smile: RCT IRL, by Kevin Loeffler, is a wearable UNO Q plus a SparkFun 9DoF IMU stuffed into a fanny pack, built to classify and score real roller coaster rides against RollerCoaster Tycoon’s own metrics — Excitement, Intensity and Nausea, computed by three on-device Edge Impulse models from accelerometer data collected mid-ride. Best in Industrial IoT went to pasquale887’s HaloSense V1, a haptic feedback headset using 13 motors to give the wearer a form of spatial awareness their biology doesn’t natively provide.
Arduino says more category spotlights are coming in the days ahead — a reminder of how much is packed into the other 149 submissions this roundup hasn’t gotten to yet.